


Don't Make Me Scream

by orphan_account



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Law Enforcement, M/M, Minor Character Death, Slow Build
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-03-10
Updated: 2013-07-02
Packaged: 2017-12-04 20:14:03
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 27,848
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/714627
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Phil is an experienced FBI agent and Clint is a college student who accidentally gets mixed up in a high profile murder case. Natasha is just trying to run damage control.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Well. Here we go. My first major multi-chapter pure Clint/Coulson fic. I'm sorry to anyone who's also reading Solo for Two - it's not going so well right now. I think I'm just better at writing Clint/Coulson than Johnlock. I don't have to research American culture as much, considering I am American. Also, dear readers, note that I will be out of the country starting this Thursday, continuing for two weeks, so I won't get to update until afterwards. I will most certainly continue this, though! Enjoy!
> 
> Also note that all of my knowledge of the workings of the FBI come from the internet and bad TV shows. I do have a few text books about forensic science, though, so most of that stuff should be fairly accurate. 
> 
> Trigger Warnings: Talk of violence, and hints at child abuse.

Looking back on it, Clint made a lot of mistakes that day. He’s never regretted any of them, but he could certainly see now why Natasha nearly had a heart attack then. He was quite willing to admit that there were certain things that he could have done better (a lot better) but what was done was done. It all started out with something rather simple. 

A promise. 

Of course, when phrased like that it really _did_ sound simple. The situation was actually a little more complicated. 

“Come on, Tasha! You promised!” Clint whined from where he was sprawled over his best friend’s couch. “You can’t go back on a promise.” 

“You know I wasn’t actually serious,” Natasha protested as she rushed around the apartment, grabbing her keys and pulling on her sleek black stilettos. 

“I got all dressed up and everything!” Clint said, glaring at her. “The only reason you’re saying that you weren’t serious is because you didn’t believe I could do it!”

“Of course I didn’t believe you,” Natasha shot back, searching through the kitchen for her cell phone. “If I hadn’t talked to Professor Banner myself, I would have thought you were lying. I still don’t understand how you managed to convince him that you’re a new professor teaching statistics.”

“But I _did!_ ” Clint yelled, hoping she heard him as she rummaged around in the kitchen. “And now you have to sneak me in to see your workplace!” 

“I work at the New York _FBI field office!_ ” Natasha said, stuffing her phone in her bag and pausing for a moment in front of the mirror in the front hallway, adjusting her ponytail. “Do you know how much trouble I’d get in if someone found out that you’re not authorized to be in the building, but I snuck you in anyway?”

“Come _on_ , Nat!” Clint protested, standing up from the couch and walking over to her. “You _promised_ that if I convinced Professor Banner that I was another professor and not an undergrad, that you’d finally let me see your work. I did it – now you have to hold up your end of the deal. I can pretend I fit in. I’ve been taking all the right classes – forensic science, abnormal psychology, history of law, etc.”

Natasha sighed and turned to look at Clint. She frowned at him, a contemplative look on her face, looking him over for a few moments. She crosser her arms and a stern look settled over her face. 

“Look, fine. One hour,” Natasha said cautiously. “Next week I’ll sneak you a visitor’s badge and let you in to see my workspace for one hour, and one hour only. You will stay with me at all times and you will be on your _best_ behavior. You will do _everything_ I say – no questions asked. And should you get separated from me and someone realizes that you’re not authorized to be in the building, then you do _not_ know me. I’m not going to risk losing my job because you want to see how accurate those stupid crime shows are.” 

“Yes!” Clint shouted, sweeping his best friend into a tight hug, spinning her around. “Have I told you how amazing you are lately?” 

“Yeah, well, I expect to hear it a lot more often, now,” Natasha said, although she couldn’t keep the hint of a smile off her face. “Now let me go, or I’ll be late for work.” 

With that, she swept out the door. A week later, she swept out the door, but with Clint close on her heels. 

“Do you remember the rules?” Natasha asked, turning off the car but not yet opening the doors, pinning Clint with a serious look. 

“One hour, stay with you, be on my best behavior, do anything you say, and if I get lost, I don’t know you,” Clint listed off, giving her a rakish grin. 

“Good,” Natasha said, nodding. “Just try hard to keep your big mouth shut.” 

“Yes, Mom,” Clint shot back, rolling his eyes. 

Natasha punched him in the arm, not hard enough to do damage, but enough so that it’d be a little sore for a while. Clint yelped and glared at her. She smirked and pulled a FBI visitor’s badge out of her pocket, handing it over to him. Clint took it eagerly and pinned it to his suit jacket (the only one he owned) before getting out the car. 

“You know, I think you’re the one New Yorker who actually has a car,” Clint said, observing the nearly empty parking structure. 

“Tony Stark does,” Natasha replied, locking her car and then starting to walk over to the door marked “elevators.” 

“Tony Stark is millionaire,” Clint pointed out. 

“Tony Stark is my colleague,” Natasha shot back. “And I appreciate nice cars. I’m not going to give that up just because I was transferred to New York City.” 

Clint glanced back at Natasha’s cherry red BMW Z4. Yeah, he could see why Natasha wouldn’t give up driving just because driving in New York was horrible. That car was the reason she had such a crappy little apartment, actually. Clint had no clue how long she’d had to save her money to buy the car. He’d tried to get her to let him drive before, but she’d nearly bit his head off the first (and only) time he’d suggested it. She’s torture him to death if he ever put even the tiniest of scratches on it. Sometimes Clint thought she loved the car more than him. She probably did. 

“Wait – you _work_ with Tony Stark?” Clint asked, Natasha’s previous statement finally catching up to him. “I mean, I heard he did some consulting with the FBI on cyber terrorism stuff, but you work in violent crime and homicide.” 

“He helps us with our tech sometimes,” Natasha replied, pushing the up button for the elevator. “Hacking, encryption, data recovery, etc. I also think he’s infatuated with one of my other coworkers.”

“Really? I thought he was dating that Pepper chick,” Clint said as they stepped into the elevator, Natasha pushing the button for level twenty three. “That’s what all the tabloids say, at least.” 

“I think he’s angling for a threesome,” Natasha replied, shrugging. “It’s none of my business, though.” 

“Nat, it’s _always_ your business if you think it’ll help you to get people to do things for you,” Clint shot back, arching an eyebrow. “You are the _queen_ of blackmail. Well, legal blackmail.” 

“And how would you know if I was involved in any illegal blackmail?” Natasha asked, arching an eyebrow right back at him. 

Clint wasn’t quite sure how to respond to that. The elevator binged and the doors slid open. Clint held back, letting Natasha stride forward purposefully. He fell back into step behind her, sinking back into his childhood defense mechanism of “nothing to see here – just some inconsequential kid.” The person stationed at the security desk barely even glanced at them as they swiped their badges. Clint didn’t hesitate as he followed Natasha, tailoring his body language to make him blend in more seamlessly than a chameleon. 

Clint carefully scanned the open workplace, cataloguing all of the people working at desks, case files piled up and computer monitors glowing. Natasha, however, kept on walking. She strode through the rows of desks to a hallway lined with a series of smaller, more private rooms. She eventually entered the last one at the end of the hall. Clint ducked in after her and looked around, taking in the slightly larger desks and quieter surroundings. It was clear that multiple people used the office, but it seemed more like it was for a certain team of people. 

“My desk’s the one in the corner,” Natasha said, motioning towards one of the tidier desks with very few personal items crowding its surface. “Try not to stick your big nose in everyone else’s business, though. Hill gets pissed when people mess with her stuff.”

Clint opened his mouth to make some sort of witty retort, however he was cut off as another man ducked into the room, making a beeline for Natasha. 

“Romanov,” he greeted her, friendly, although he was certainly there to talk to her about something serious. 

“Sitwell,” she replied, carefully taking in his appearance. 

“Woo’s dead,” the other agent said, lips pressed in a tight line. 

Clint saw Natasha’s eyes widen. It was easily one of the most dramatic displays of shock he’d ever seen cross her face. Looking at Sitwell, Clint wasn’t terribly surprised to see a deep current of sadness in his eyes, although he carefully kept it out of his expression, ever the professional. 

“The same killer?” Natasha asked after a moment, her expression turning cold and ruthless. 

“We believe so,” Sitwell replied, nodding. “Same bullet size and make and fairly similar circumstances. We’re not entirely positive, but it would be a hell of a coincidence if it wasn’t connected.” 

“I want to see the scene photos,” Natasha said, her tone sharp. “Is Hill holding onto them?” 

“Actually, Coulson’s calling a division wide meeting right now, out in the main room,” Sitwell said, stepping in front of Natasha to prevent her from storming out to find Hill. “You can see the crime scene photos in more detail afterwards. I was actually sent to come find you. He wants you to help him find a replacement for Woo on this case.” 

“Fine,” Natasha said, scowling. “I’ll be there in a minute – just let me grab some of the files.” 

Sitwell nodded and left the room, giving Clint a cursory glance before he left. His eyes landed on the visitor’s badge, though, and he gave Clint a half hearted smile before slipping out the door. Natasha meanwhile was back at her desk, yanking a couple of thick files out of her desk drawer with perhaps a little more force than necessary. She then strode back towards the door, pausing for a moment when she saw Clint still standing awkwardly in the corner of the room. 

“Stay here,” Natasha told him, shifting the files in her arms to get a better grip on them. “I should be back in less than half an hour.” 

With that, she hurried out of the room. 

Clint had no intention of staying put when a murder was being discussed right outside. He suspected Natasha knew that, but if Natasha had hope in anything, it was that someday Clint would get smarter and learn from his mistakes. It was not yet that day. So, only moments later, Clint carefully padded down the hallway and poked his head around the corner to get a better look at the large room that he’d initially walked through. 

The majority of the agents looked like they were already gathered there, but a couple were still trickling in from various other side offices. Standing at the front of the room was Natasha. She was talking to who Clint assumed was another agent (her superior, actually). The man was rather average looking, not terribly tall, his hairline starting to recede. He was wearing a nicely cut suit, though, and Clint could easily tell from his stance and figure that the man was in good shape. 

Suddenly Clint found himself staring directly into the man’s piercing light blue eyes. Clint could practically feel the agent mentally taking him apart and categorizing him. It only lasted for a moment, but Clint still felt like the man had read his entire soul right then. He shivered and he wasn’t quite sure if it was in fear or exhilaration. 

“Is everyone here?” the agent asked, surveying the crowd. “Good. Let’s get started. For those of you who haven’t already heard, Agent Jimmy Woo, one of the primary agents working on the Morse case, was killed yesterday. His neighbor saw him enter his apartment at around one in the afternoon and his wife, Suwan Woo, found his body two hours later when she came home.”

The agent then picked up the remote for the projector, turning it on to display a series of photos taken from the crime scene – mainly ones of Agent Woo’s corpse. 

“He was killed by one gunshot to the head. The pattern of the blood splatter and the bullet hole in the glass of his window suggests that he was shot from some distance by someone outside of the apartment. The apartment in the skyscraper across the street from Woo’s building directly in line with his apartment is currently unoccupied, and the window was unlocked – ”

“Why does that matter?” Clint blurted out. 

Everyone turned to stare at Clint and for a moment he felt like melting into the floor. Natasha was glaring at him in a way the promised extreme bodily harm later. However, he was frozen in place by a certain agent’s intense blue eyes. 

“Why does it matter that the window was unlocked?” the agent asked, looking at Clint with an unimpressed expression. 

“Well, all of this about the apartment across the street,” Clint said, confused. 

“Looking at the gunshot wound, along with the blood splatter, and window damage, that’s where the shooter was positioned – ” the agent started, only to be cut off by Clint again. 

“There’s no way someone could make that shot!” Clint protested, shaking his head. “Not from that position.” 

“It’s only about eighty feet away. A trained sniper could – ”

“What does the distance have to do with anything?” Clint asked, frowning. “I’m talking about the crosswinds and the sun’s glare.” 

“Elaborate,” the agent commanded, a thoughtful look on his face. 

“Ah, well,” Clint faltered, caught off guard by the agent’s cooperation. “When I checked he wind speed measured at the airport yesterday, it was over twenty miles per hour, and then you’ve gotta factor in the city’s wind tunnel effect. With all of these skyscrapers the air flow in concentrated and amplified, so the crosswind on the bullet would be even stronger than that. I think the wind speed in the city even got up near the forties yesterday. That’ll affect the trajectory of the bullet at least somewhat. Plus, from what I can tell from the pictures you’ve got up there, the bullet was pretty small. That means it’d be affected even more.”

The agent’s eyes narrowed and Clint could tell that he’d fully caught the man’s attention. He tried not to falter under the man’s intense gaze as he continued. 

“That probably wouldn’t be too bad, though. What I’d be more concerned about is the glare off the building. I mean, with all those windows the side of the apartment building is almost entirely glass. You say that Agent Woo was killed between one and three yesterday, but if that was true and the shooter was in the building opposite, then the sun would be positioned exactly so that the side of Woo’s building would be facing the sun and reflecting the most light. It would be really fucking difficult to see inside the building, then. The shot couldn’t have been made from the outside.”

The agent was still staring at him intently, and Clint was starting to wish he had the ability to just melt into the floorboards. The man’s expression was completely unreadable and Clint couldn’t tell if he was in deep shit or if the man was impressed. 

“Agent Romanov, continue the debrief,” the agent finally said, handing Natasha the projector remote. “You, in the back – come with me.” 

Deep shit, then. Clint glanced over at Natasha quickly. If looks could kill, Clint would be dead a million times over right now. Natasha was going to completely _destroy_ him when they left later. Well, on the bright side of things, the FBI might not let him go. He couldn’t image that they took too kindly to unauthorized guests. 

The agent brushed by him, heading back the way that Clint had come, towards the slightly smaller office spaces. Clint trailed behind him in a way that was slightly akin to that of a kicked puppy. The agent continued down the hallway until he got to the room that Natasha’s desk had been in. Clint followed him inside and had to resist the urge to flinch as he heard the door click shut behind him. 

“What’s your name, Agent?” the man asked, going up to one of the desks and pulling out two chairs, motioning for Clint to sit down. 

“Ah, Barton,” Clint said, knowing that there was no way he’d be able to remember an alias that he made up right now. “Clint Barton.” 

“Barton?” the agent clarified, sitting up a little straighter. “Weren’t you supposed to be transferred here about a year ago?”

Oh shit. Oh shit. Fuck. The agent was talking about his brother, wasn’t he? Clint brother had been an FBI agent over in LA, but he’d gone missing about a year ago, a couple of weeks before he was supposed to be transferred to another branch. Clint hadn’t been very close with his brother by that time, so he hadn’t known where exactly Barney was going to be transferred. He just had to hope that no one remembered that Agent Barton’s first name was supposed to be “Barney” not “Clint.” 

“Uh, yeah. That was – there was some stuff that came up back in LA,” Clint said, containing his wince at his horrible excuse. “Undercover stuff. That’s why I, ah, ‘disappeared’.” 

Clint thought he saw a hint of skepticism in the agent’s eyes, but the man made no comment. Hopefully he bought the excuse, then. Clint was completely fucked if he decided to dig any deeper. 

“Nice to have you with us finally, Agent Barton,” the man replied, extending a hand for Clint to shake. “Phil Coulson. I’m the Special Agent in Charge for New York.” 

“Pleased to meet you,” Clint greeted, forcing a small smile on his face. “I haven’t really had time to… go through everything yet.” 

“You’ve already been assigned a case?” Coulson questioned, looking almost disappointed. 

“No, I meant that I just haven’t gotten a chance to look through profiles and protocols yet,” Clint said quickly, hoping that he was saying the right things. “My transfer was a little rushed. I’m not even sure that it’s permanent…” 

“Well, I hope it is permanent,” Coulson replied, startling Clint slightly. “You have a good eye. Considering how you haven’t been assigned a case yet and my team is down a member, I want you to replace Agent Woo on the Morse case.”

“What?” Clint blurted, unable to contain himself. “I mean, that would be great, but I should probably check to make sure that I’m not needed elsewhere. I’m not – I haven’t done much homicide work. I was working with – ” Clint struggled to remember what his brother had been working on before he disappeared, “ – gun running, back in LA.” 

“You know your way around detective work. That’s all I care about,” Coulson asserted, giving Clint a firm look. “I’ll go talk to Chief Fury about officially assigning you to the case. You can start looking at the case files.” 

Clint suddenly found himself with an armful of manila folders with paperclips and post-its sticking out on all sides. Agent Coulson stood up from his swivel chair, taking a moment to adjust his jacket before moving towards the door, leaving Clint with the files. 

“You can take the desk to the left of mine,” Coulson said, pausing in the doorway. “It was Woo’s. Just stack any of his personal items next to it on the carpet. We’ll get rid of them later. The rest of the team should be here soon.”

With that, he left. Clint had absolutely no clue what to do. Should he try to escape now? He could probably sneak out before Agent Coulson came back. That would look really suspicious, though. They’d probably realize that he wasn’t supposed to be there and start a manhunt for him, thinking he was a terrorist or something, trying to steal information from the FBI. Maybe they’d even think he was the murderer for this case. It wouldn’t be too much of a jump to think such. He was able to see things about the crime scene that no one else had and in his criminal psychology class his professor had talked about how sometimes serial killers like to try and insert themselves into the investigation. Also, if they accused him of murder, Natasha could be cited as an accomplice. Clint had probably already fucked up her career enough – she didn’t need to be convicted of aiding and abetting a criminal. 

So, really, running was a worse option than staying. Clint sighed and walked over to Woo’s desk. Well, it was technically his desk now. He set the stack of manila folders on the desk and pulled the first one off the top of the pile. He opened the first file and his heart caught in his throat. 

The picture staring up at him from the folder was of a young woman that he’d known. Bobbi Morse. He hadn’t known her particularly well, but he’d considered her a casual friend. They’d met last year. He’d been a college freshman and she’d been finishing up graduate school, both of them at Columbia University. Clint had actually been early for class for once and seen Boobi hanging out in the classroom. Being the hotheaded idiot he was – combined with the fact that Bobbi was smoking hot – he’d tried flirting with her. She’d let him prattle on for an embarrassing amount of time about how they should start a two-person study group. 

She’d then told him that her office hours were from four thirty to six. 

Clint was momentarily caught off guard, but had then smiled cheekily and asked her to give him a tour of campus if she’d been there for so long already. Bobbi had laughed. It was the start of a beautiful friendship. Of course, later that year Bobbi had joined the FBI and they’d kind of fallen out of contact. It really hurt, though, to find out that he hadn’t even known that she was dead. Clint didn’t know which would have been worse – finding out that she’d been murdered while watching the news or this way – reading the impersonal FBI file. 

Clint closed his eyes for a moment taking a deep breath and bracing himself before continuing to read the file. Bobbi had been found one week ago, dead in her apartment. It was the same as Woo – a single shot to the head through a window. Clint frowned. The building across the street from Bobbi’s apartment building also contained apartments. Bobbi’s neighborhood also consisted mostly of students – she hadn’t yet saved up enough to move out of her tiny apartment. But the coroner’s report said that she’d been killed around seven in the morning. She’d been found the next day. Clint didn’t doubt the coroner’s assessment of Bobbi’s time of death, but there was no way someone would be able to shoot through the glass of Bobbi’s window at that hour without anyone hearing. Most classes didn’t start until eight. 

Clint grabbed an unused sticky note off of Woo’s (his) desk, feeling a little guilty about stealing from a dead man, and scribbled a quick note to himself about the strange situation on it, posting it to Bobbi’s file. Then he set aside Bobbi’s manila folder, moving onto the next in his pile. 

When he opened up this folder, he was little relieved (guiltily so) that it wasn’t for another person he knew. The second victim was Jacob Strzeszewski. He was fairly average as far as Special Agents for the FBI go. He had no particular enemies outside of the people he’d arrested, and even then there were no terribly high profile names in his arrest list. He had no particular connection to Bobbi other than the fact that they’d worked on a case together a couple of months ago. The only reasons that their deaths were connected in the first place was because of how they were both FBI, they were both killed within a short time period of each other (Strzeszewski was killed three days after Bobbi), and they were both shot with one bullet to the head from some distance.

Clint stared at the crime scene photos intently. He was looking for any inconsistency, no matter how small. The college student sifted through the stack of photos, looking for a specific one – the one of a bullet hole through the window. He eventually found it, but was immediately struck by how different it was than the previous ones. 

A lot of that probably had to do with the fact that Strzeszewski lived in a house as opposed to an apartment. He lived a ways out of the city and commuted to work every day. The house was only one story and the shooter could have easily been standing outside in the garden. Clint couldn’t find any reason why Strzeszewski couldn’t have been shot through his window, this time. 

No, no – that was wrong! There was something, he just couldn’t quite put his finger on it. Something… something… 

Well, what was bothering him about the circumstances of all of these deaths? The distance, for one. The glass, second. The… 

He picked up a picture of Strzeszewski’s prone body, lying lifeless on the floor. Clint squinted at it a little more closely, taking in the positioning and the angle. He frowned and pulled out a picture of the whole room, looking at the bullet hole in the glass and the corpse lying on the floor. His eyes flickered between them for a moment before realization dawned on him. 

Strzeszewski was lying directly in front of the window. According to the reports of the other agents on the case, the shooter was apparently at least ten yards away from the house, going by the footprints they found in the dirt and the lack of bushes and other cover in Strzeszewski’s yard. But that couldn’t be right. For the shooter to have accurately hit Strzeszewski, they would have had to be at least within five yard of the window. It was actually really difficult to shoot through glass, and the bullet could be deflected by a good eight inches. Strzeszewski’s body was directly in front of the bullet hole – that would mean that the bullet hadn’t been deflected at all. That couldn’t be right. 

Clint went back to Bobbi’s file and pullet out the crime scene pictures again. Sure enough, he found the same thing. Body directly in front of the bullet hole. Strange. He bet that if he had pictures of Woo’s apartment he’d find the same thing. 

Clint frowned and set Strzeszewski’s folder aside, too, marking it with another sticky note. He then opened the third and final case file. Again, Clint felt his heart tighten a bit. Clay Quartermain was the third victim. Clint had only seen the man once, but he knew that he was a friend of Professor Banner. He wondered how the physics professor was dealing with the agent’s death. Probably not well. 

The death of Agent Quartermain was no more or less gruesome than the others. It was exactly the same – single bullet to the head and a bullet hole in the window of his apartment. Again, Clint noticed the odd positioning of the body in relation to the bullet hole in the window. Artificial. Staged. But what was the point of pretending to shoot someone through the window? 

Right then, someone barged into the office, nearly causing Clint to fall out of his chair in surprise. The person was halfway to their desk before they noticed him, blinking at him in confusion. Then they shrugged and held out a paper cup to him. 

“Coffee?” the man asked. 

“Uh…” Clint replied, unsure what exactly to do about this situation.

“You must be the hotshot that Hill was talking about earlier,” the man said, finishing his own cup of coffee and then starting on the second when Clint didn’t take it. “I’ve gotta say, though, it takes some balls to tell Coulson he’s wrong. Kudos to you.”

“Who are you?” Clint finally asked, unsure what else to say. 

“Who am I? Tony fucking Stark, that’s who,” the man said, looking at Clint incredulously. “You don’t get out much, do you?” 

“Oh,” Clint said, shocked. 

He could certainly see it now, and he was internally banging himself over the head for not realizing it sooner. He’d certainly seen Stark on TV before, not to mention in all of the newspapers and magazines. It was kind of impossible to have never seen a picture of Tony Stark: Genius, Billionaire, Playboy, Philanthropist before. 

“I’m Clint Barton,” Clint continued, trying to make the situation a little less awkward. “Just transferred from – LA.” 

Damn. He’d nearly forgotten where he said he’d transferred from. There was no way he was going to get through the day without anyone realizing that he was just a college sophomore. He was completely and utterly screwed, and that was before considering how Natasha was going to kill him later. He was quite certain that no one would ever find the body. 

“Nice to have you Clint-From-LA,” Stark said, slapping him on the back in a friendly manner. “Hope you’re not the next one offed.” 

“Thanks,” Clint said dryly, starting to warm up to Stark’s strange brand of humor. “The feeling is mutual.” 

Stark laughed at that. Clint counted it as a small victory. 

“I was worried you were going to be like Hill for a second there,” he replied, grinning. “She has a stick so far up her ass, she probably coughs up woodchips. She says she doesn’t appreciate my sense of humor.” 

“No one appreciates your sense of humor, Stark,” Natasha interrupted, walking into the room. “I’m sure Barton’s only putting up with you because he knows he’ll only be here _temporarily_.” 

Clint did his best not to shrink under Natasha’s withering glare as she emphasized the word “temporarily.” Yep. He was in deep shit. Nat was totally going to kill him when they got home. 

“Too late, Romanov,” another voice breaks in – Coulson’s voice. “Fury has already authorized Agent Barton’s full involvement in this case. We haven’t gotten all of the transfer papers from LA yet, but we can’t wait for them. The killer’s not slowing down so neither are we. We need another agent on this case, and Barton made some good observations today that _you_ missed.”

No one else seemed to notice, but Clint could tell that Natasha was trying her hardest not to flinch as Agent Coulson mentioned that she’d missed some important aspects of the case. It was kind of dick move, but true. Of course, Natasha knew much more about hand to hand combat and short range weapons than Clint, who specialized in long range. On the other hand, Coulson was assuming that Natasha’s anger had to do with Clint’s barging in on her case, not with their personal connection. Which was good. It meant that he didn’t suspect anything yet. 

Natasha looked like she might retort, but then four more people walked into the room. Clint recognized one of them as the agent who’d talked to Natasha earlier (Sitwell, or something like that). Next to him were two tall blonde men and one stern looking woman. The men both looked relatively friendly, although the woman looked like she could turn you to ice with one withering glare. Having known women like Natasha, Clint was half convinced that she actually could. 

“Is this the new addition to our fine team?” the taller of the two blondes asked, his voice booming and oddly Shakespearean. “Friend, it is a pleasure to meet you!” 

“You too,” Clint replied, smiling and trying to ignore the subtle glares that Natasha was still shooting in his direction. “Clint Barton.” 

“Thor Odinson,” the man boomed, grinning brightly as he extended a huge hand for Clint to shake. 

“Nice to meet you, Agent Odinson,” Clint replied. 

“Please address me merely as Thor,” the man exclaimed enthusiastically, causing Clint to smile a little a little wider. 

“I’m Steve Rogers,” the second blonde said, extending his own hand once Clint had finished greeting Thor. “Glad to have you with us.” 

“Thanks,” Clint said, feeling a little humbled at how sincere Rogers sounded. 

He then turned to Sitwell, giving him his best imitation of a slightly nervous smile, trying to gain as many sympathies as possible. He wanted as many people as possible on his side – that way they’d be less focused on him. He didn’t want them to be suspicious, looking for flaws in his every action. That would only lead to people finding out about how he wasn’t actually an FBI agent. 

“I don’t think we were properly introduced earlier,” Clint said, trying to look as friendly as possible. 

“Jasper Sitwell,” the agent said, returning his smile. “You came in with Natasha, didn’t you?” 

Shit. He didn’t need to draw attention to that. 

“Ah, well, kind of,” he replied, searching for a proper excuse. “I was standing awkwardly in the doorway and she noticed me. I was just asking her for directions. She was about to take me to see Chief, ah, Fury, was it? Before she was called away to the meeting.”

“Oh,” Sitwell said. “Do you still need to go see Fury, then?” 

“Not at the moment,” Clint answered, glancing over at Coulson for a moment. “I think Agent Coulson got everything sorted out for me.” 

“You should still go check in with him. It’s standard protocol,” a cold voice broke in, causing Clint to turn and look at the only person he hadn’t been introduced to yet. 

“Okay. Thanks for telling me, Agent…?” Clint replied, hoping that his smile would melt her expression at least a little bit. 

“Hill,” she said curtly, just as icy as before. “Now if we’re done with this little meet and greet, I suggest that we move on. In case any of you have forgotten, we have four agents dead and no proper leads.”

Clint’s smile disappeared as quickly as it had come and he stood a little straighter. He knew that he wasn’t going to win any points with Agent Hill unless he got down to work. She was right – they didn’t have time for this. That was probably another reason Natasha was pissed at him. He was really going to have to pull his own weight around here if he didn’t want to be ousted as a fake. 

“Sorry,” he said curtly, looking away from her and over to Coulson again. “I looked over those case files you gave me on each of the victims, and there are a few things about them that are bothering me.” 

“And what would that be?” Coulson asked, interested but clearly a bit skeptical. 

“Here, how about I – ” Clint started, grabbing the files and pulling out a few pictures from them, pinning them up on the large whiteboard that stood in one corner of the room. “You guys might want to pull up chairs.”

Coulson nodded curtly and grabbed his swivel chair from his desk, positioning himself so that he could see both Clint and the whiteboard clearly. The others followed suit, although Agent Hill decided to stay standing. Her unconvinced stance made Clint a little bit uncomfortable, but he did his best to ignore it. 

“So, starting with Bo – Agent Morse,” Clint started, starting to say ‘Bobbi’ but catching himself, “there are a few inconsistencies with her, ah, circumstances. Like with Agent Woo, I don’t think that she could have been shot through her apartment window. Well, it’s physically possible, but I don’t think it’s likely.” 

A couple of the agents looked like they wanted to protest, but they held the tongues, waiting for Clint to explain what he’d noticed. 

“The coroner’s report places her time of death at around seven am. However, Agent Morse lives in an area with a lot of college students – ” Clint started, only to be cut off by another agent. 

“Actually, that area has a lot of people who work night and early morning shifts,” Rogers protested, looking a little apologetic for correcting Clint. “Students tend to be a little more concentrated near the university campuses.” 

“That’s true for the general neighborhood,” Clint conceded, “but Agent Morse’s block is actually comprised of more students. I have a friend who lives on the block and she pointed it out to me.”

It had actually been Bobbi herself who had pointed that out to Clint, but he wasn’t going to tell them that. Now that he knew that Bobbi had been the killer’s first victim, he wanted to be on this case even more. He couldn’t risk someone labeling him as emotionally compromised. Plus, if they knew that he’d “arrived from LA” so close to when Bobbi was killed, he’d become an immediate suspect. 

“So, anyway, if she was killed at around seven, especially by being shot through the window, it’s highly unlikely that no one would notice, considering most university classes start at eight. There would have been quite a few awake students around,” Clint said. “I saw that you interviewed the owners of the apartment across the street that you think the person was shooting from, and found that they were out of the building at the time, but it’s kind of odd that none of the other students who would be leaving their apartments at around that time would see anyone strange in the building.” 

“That makes sense, but it’s still all circumstantial,” Sitwell cut in, frowning. “We’re going to need a little more to go on if we want to try and make that into a proper case.” 

“I have something else, too,” Clint said quickly, not wanting all of his observations to get so easily dismissed. “And this one goes for Morse, Strzeszewski, _and_ Quartermain. It probably also applies to Woo, but I haven’t had a chance to look at those photos in detail yet.”

“Here,” Coulson said, fishing in another manila folder and producing a small stack of crime scene photos. “See what you can do with them.” 

Clint took a moment to scan them, his sharp eyes taking in every detail before he nodded, mouth pressed in a grim line. 

“Yeah. Like I suspected, it’s the same as the other three,” he said, pinning the picture of the entire crime scene next to those of the other there victims. “The body positioning is all wrong.” 

“The body positioning?” Sitwell questioned, looking a little confused. 

“Yeah,” Clint said, nodding. “You see, when you shoot through glass, especially thick glass like the windowpanes in high-rise apartment buildings, the bullet’s path gets altered. This deflection really affects the accuracy of the bullet. I mean, how wide is the average city street?”

“Major ones like the one in front of Woo’s apartment building are supposed to be sixty four feet wide,” Coulson replied, making Clint blink in surprise. He hadn’t been expecting an answer that precise. 

“Okay, well, if you add in the sidewalks, too, then that’s gotta be about twenty five yards,” Clint continued. “By that distance, the thick glass could divert the bullet’s path by as much as a foot. There’s only a very small chance that the bullet would go through the glass at exactly the same angle in came in at. Also, all of these were headshots, so even a deviation of a few inches would have a huge effect. 

“The really strange thing, though, is that all of the bodies are positioned directly in the line of sight of the bullet hole, in such a way that they would have been hit if the bullet traveled straight, directly through the hole. In fact, I might even dare to say that they were positioned there on purpose, to make it look like they were shot through the window.” 

“Where are you getting this information about bullet deviation from?” Tony asked suddenly, making Clint blink in surprise as the humorous, nonchalant man from before disappeared in the face of an important case. 

“There was an article in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology about it that I read a while back,” Clint replied. “I don’t have the copy with me, but I could probably get you an electronic copy for you to look at. There was also an article in the Journal of Forensic Sciences that I skimmed.” 

“Sweet,” Tony said, grinning and breaking the spell of seriousness that had fallen over him. 

Natasha was giving him a look that clearly said “You read?” Clint was highly tempted to stick his tongue out at her, but he valiantly resisted. Of course he read. He’d found the two articles while writing a paper for intro to applied physics, though. He read, just not on his own free time. 

“I also have a lot of personal experience with firearms,” Clint added, glancing at Agent Coulson for a moment. “Back in LA I worked mainly on gun running.” 

Ha. He could totally be a spy. Look at how well he was doing at remembering his cover story. Clint had actually learned about firearms and other long distance weapons through actual practice with them. His older brother, Barney, had taught him to shoot a gun when he was nine (Clint never found out where Barney had gotten the gun) and later he’d gotten into archery after one of his foster parents had said that he needed to take up a sport to “keep him out from underfoot.” 

He no longer carried a gun with him, but he still had a bow and arrows that he stashed at Natasha’s place. He didn’t think his roommate back at his dorm would take too kindly to having it stashed in his closet. He also didn’t really trust his roommate and the other people in his building to not try playing around with it or, worse, steal it. He practiced with it every day at a local archery range and had even toyed with the notion of trying out for the Olympic team before. Suffice to say, he knew his way around projectile weapons. 

“What’s the point of pretending to shoot them through the window, though?” Sitwell asked, face scrunched up in thought. “Are they trying to keep us from noticing something inside the room by drawing our attention to outside their apartments?” 

“Maybe they weren’t actually killed in their houses,” Maria said suddenly, everyone turning to look at her. “The bullet hole was just put in the windows to make it look like they were shot there.” 

“Have any of you gotten a chance to look at the bullets yet?” Clint asked, a thought occurring to him. 

“No,” Tony replied, a considering look on his face. “Actually, the bullets were removed from all of the bodies. The doc who did the autopsies actually thought that the bullet had gotten lost somewhere in the brain tissue for a while, because they were taken out so carefully. We only know the general size of the bullets due to the entrance wounds created.” 

“Well, it looks like the killer knew at least something about shooting through glass, then,” Clint said, a contemplative look on his face. 

“Ah. The bullet’s shape is distorted when it hits the glass,” Natasha explained. “If we were to recover the bullets then we’d catch on more quickly to the fact that the shooter did not actually shoot through the glass.” 

“Is it possible that the murderer did shoot his victims at close range?” Thor asked, looking at Clint, the self proclaimed firearms expert. “If he merely used a smaller gun would such a thing have been feasible?”

“Maybe,” Clint said, shrugging. “I’m not exactly an expert on gunshot wounds, though.”

“If such were to be fact, then the killer could have done his dastardly deeds anywhere,” Thor said, his expression solemn. “If not, then there is a smaller list of places. It would have to be a place with enough space for him to shoot them at a fair distance.” 

“I think we have enough places to start looking, now. Odinson, I want you to go check into the gunshot wounds,” Agent Coulson ordered, standing up from his chair. “Go to the morgue and ask the pathologists. Try to get a few opinions if possible. Rogers, Romanov, Hill, and Sitwell, each of you will go to one of the crime scenes and check out the interiors of the apartments more thoroughly. Stark, I want you to start checking through all of the places where gunshots have been reported in the past week. And Barton…”

Clint shivered slightly as Coulson’s intense blue eyes settled on him, waiting to hear what his verdict was. 

“You go talk to Fury and get your official ID. Then I want you to get back here and go over all of the files with me. I want to see if there’s anything else we’ve missed.” 

Everyone began to disperse, going to do their assigned tasks. Clint glanced frantically at Natasha, unsure what to do. She just glared at him and stalked out of the room. Well, Natasha had abandoned him. Should he go along with what Agent Coulson told him to do? That’s what he’d been doing so far and it seemed to work out pretty well. But would he be able to fool this “Chief Fury” person? It certainly wasn’t going to be easy. And how was he supposed to get an official ID if he didn’t have any paperwork? This was a complete mess. 

Clint glanced over at Coulson who gave him a look that clearly said “Why aren’t you gone yet?” He felt his cheeks heat slightly, but he rolled his eyes and the other agent before walking out the door… only to walk back into the room a moment later. 

“Uh, hey. So I kind of don’t know where Chief Fury’s office is…” he said, looking awkwardly at Coulson, his cutest smile on his face. (He knew it was his cutest. He’d had Natasha rate all of his smiles once when they were snowed in the apartment for a weekend.) 

“Go back out into the central room and down the hallway opposite this one. His office is at the very end of the hall,” Coulson told him, a small, amused smile on his face that really shouldn’t have been as attractive as it was. 

“Yes, Sir!” Clint quipped, grinning back at him before walking back out of the room, following Coulson’s instructions until he came to stand in front of the office door. 

He could quite easily slip away now. No one was paying attention to him, and he could always say he was going to interview a suspect or something. No one would pay him a second glance. But then they’d think that he was the murderer. They’d think that he’d been toying with them and leading them on a wild goose chase. Then they’d find Natasha and Natasha would get blamed, and here he was back at the “Why did I ever make Natasha let me in here?” train of thought. He should have just slept in. It was the very beginning of summer break and he wasn’t taking any summer classes. He should have just slept the day away. Why did he come up with this stupid idea?

“You know, it would help if you knocked,” a rough, grouchy sounding voice yelled from behind the door, nearly making Clint jump. “I don’t have all day.” 

“Damn. How’d you know I was there?” Clint asked, laughing, as he opened the door, trying to cover up how shaken he was. “You have security cameras set up everywhere?”

“That’s classified information, Agent,” Fury – because that had to be who he was – answered in such a deadpan tone that Clint wasn’t entirely sure if he was joking or not. 

“Well, if you knew that I was out there, then I guess you probably know why I’m here,” Clint said, looking around the rather dimly lit office. “Just checking in. Sir.” 

Clint winced internally at how obvious it was that he wasn’t used to calling people “Sir.” He had been a one point, what with his father and some of the foster parents that came afterwards, but he’d tried to break that habit as soon as he could. It was just a reminder of all the people who’d screwed him over in the past. 

“If that’s all your superiors meant when they said that you didn’t play well with authority, then I think we’ll get along just fine,” Fury stated, a slight smirk on his face. 

“Sorry, what?” Clint asked, confused about what Fury was talking about. 

“There have been complaints of ‘insubordination’ before, but if their only problem was you not tacking a ‘sir’ onto everything you said, then that’s fine by me,” Fury explained, his one eye boring into Clint almost as deeply as Coulson’s blue ones. “You’ll find I run things a little differently around here. I expect to be obeyed, but I don’t expect you like it or even be quiet about it. All I care about is getting the job done. Are we clear, Agent?”

“Crystal,” Clint replied, completely serious now. 

“Then get out of my office. I know that Agent Coulson probably told you to get an official ID, but I don’t have the paperwork. You’ll have to deal with your visitor’s badge for now. Tell him that if he wants you out in the field, he can escort you himself,” Fury finished, his speech straightforward and no nonsense. 

“Will do,” Clint replied, a jaunty grin on his face as he gave Fury a lopsided salute. 

Fury seemed like a guy he could learn to get along with. He didn’t seem to appreciate bullshit very much. Of course, Natasha would probably say that that would be why they _wouldn’t_ get along, considering Clint was all bullshit, but that was probably just Natasha making fun of him. She tended to be that way. Clint walked back out of Fury’s office and over to the office where everyone had been before. There he found Stark in the corner furthest from the door, messing around with his laptop, probably doing what Coulson had assigned him, but there was no guarantee.

In the other corner opposite the door, Coulson sat at his desk, hunched over a large stack of files, combing through them meticulously. Clint grinned walked as quietly as he could over the carpeted floor, moving closer and closer to Agent Coulson. Clint got within two feet of him and was about to spring, only to have Coulson turn around to look at him. He looked highly unimpressed. Clint resisted the urge to look petulant and instead tried to look nonchalant. It didn’t quite work. 

“Come back in a few years and try again,” Coulson said dryly, which, really, wasn’t what Clint had been expecting him to say. 

“I’ll get you next time,” Clint said in a mock evil voice, doing his best to keep a straight face. 

“Keep telling yourself that,” Coulson replied, looking back to the folders covering his desk. “I’m afraid we don’t have time for that sort of tomfoolery – ”

“Did you seriously just say ‘tomfoolery’?” Clint asked, cracking up. 

“ – for now. We have work to do,” Coulson continued, not paying attention to Clint’s commentary. “I’ve been going through the case files again and trying to find any extra patterns or tells that could lead to the killer. I haven’t found much, but Woo’s death has certainly changed the case.” 

Clint’s smile fell away as he saw a flicker of what looked like sadness or regret when Coulson mentioned Agent Woo. They had been on a team together. They had probably been friends. What was Clint doing here, fooling around when this was literally a matter of life and death? 

“So far all of the deaths have happened sometime early in the morning, but Woo was killed sometime between the hours of one and three in the afternoon,” Coulson went on. “That breaks the killer’s pattern.” 

“Do the first three have anything particular in common?” Clint asked, picking up Agent Woo’s file and skimming through it. “Besides that they were all FBI.”

“No,” Coulson answered, shaking his head. “No similar haunts, no common behaviors… They didn’t even work on the same types of cases. Morse worked on organized crime, Strzeszewski on cyber crimes, and Quartermain on drug related crime.”

“And Woo was with violent crime,” Clint added, mainly to just remind himself. “Maybe… well, Quartermain and Woo’s deaths were closer together than the previous ones have been, right?”

“You think Woo discovered something and was killed for it?” Coulson asked, deep in thought. “That might make sense. Our culprit might actually be more than one person. Looking back on it, it wouldn’t be all that surprising if this killing spree stemmed from organized crime. Morse was the first to be killed and that’s what she was working on. It would make more sense that way, considering the almost methodic way in which they were killed.”

“Huh. I get what you’re saying. Drug related crime would fit right into that. I’m not entirely sure about the cyber crime part, though,” Clint said, looking up from the file and over at Coulson. 

“We probably just aren’t seeing the connection yet,” Coulson replied. “It is kind of strange that these are all happening at once, but despite the pattern of the killings and the general lack of connections, I don’t think this is the work of a serial killer.” 

Clint and Coulson continued to work though the case files for the rest of the day, only stopping to get lunch, and even then, they discussed while eating. Clint wasn’t really sure how much closer they were getting, but he needed to look at the situations from every possible angle. Maybe inspiration would eventually strike. It wasn’t until it was nearly time to head home that it did. 

“You know, I think that the organized crime angle is good, but how are these people finding out that the FBI is on to them, then?” Clint asked, looking down at the manila folders which had already accumulated more than twice the amount of post-it notes that they had before lunch. “Do you think that it’s possible that they… you know…”

Clint looked over at Coulson, his voice becoming a much quieter near the end of his question, glancing over at Stark in the corner and a couple of agents passing by in the hallway.

“You think they have a mole?” Agent Coulson asked, deadly serious now. 

“It would make sense,” Clint defended. 

“And why are you telling me this?” Coulson questioned, fixing Clint with a slightly disapproving stare. 

“Why? Because it’s a real possibility, and if it’s true then we’re in deeper shit than we thought,” Clint said, looking at Coulson incredulously. Did he not realize how serious this was? 

“Barton, you’re lucky I’m not the killer, because otherwise you might as well have just signed your own death certificate,” Coulson explained, frowning at Clint. “If it is someone on the inside, which I’m already pretty sure it is, then Morse, Strzeszewski, Quartermain, and Woo probably got themselves killed by telling the killer what you just told me.”

Clint opened his mouth to retort, only to close it again before saying anything, his face coloring in embarrassment. Natasha would totally chew him out for making a stupid mistake like that. He just had this gut feeling that Coulson wasn’t the killer, though. He’d been around killers before, and while Coulson was certainly lethal, he wasn’t _dangerous_. 

Well, hopefully not. Clint wasn’t always the best judge of character. His last boyfriend was a testament to that, and Natasha would never let him forget it. 

“Ah, sorry,” Clint mumbled, unsure what exactly he was supposed to say after Coulson’s heavy lecture. “Good thing you’re not the killer.”

“That you know of,” Coulson corrected. 

“That I know of,” Clint amended. “I really don’t think you are, though.” 

“Your proclamation of trust is… appreciated,” Coulson replied, giving him a small smile. 

Clint felt his cheeks heat up again. He was slowly becoming more and more aware of how attractive Agent Coulson was. Clint totally would have paid more attention in history of law if Coulson had been the one teaching the class. Of course, his test scores probably would have been a lot worse, considering he wouldn’t actually be able to concentrate. It was really a miracle he hadn’t already combusted what with how long he’d spent in Agent Coulson’s presence in the past few hours. 

Clint was about to open his mouth and say something stupid like “You should smile more often,” or “Wow, you’re hot,” but thankfully that’s when Natasha walked in, making a beeline for Clint. She didn’t look particularly furious, but Clint could tell that her anger at him from that morning had been slowly simmering all day. 

“We’re leaving now,” Natasha said, her tone sounding utterly normal. (Which meant that she was purposefully making it normal.) “Grab your stuff.” 

“I’ll be there in a sec,” Clint replied, jumping up from his seat before turning to Coulson. “Mind if I take these files with me to look over tonight?”

“I’m afraid you can’t,” Coulson answered, piling up the folders. “We keep these more sensitive files here. We don’t want to risk someone stealing them or selling them. Not that I think you’d do either of those – it’s just standard protocol.” 

“Sure,” Clint said, nodding. “Well, I’ll see you tomorrow, then.” 

“Goodbye.” 

Clint turned and hurried after Natasha who was already halfway to the door. The elevator ride back down to the parking level was completely silent, which, honestly, scared Clint a little bit. A quiet Natasha was a deadly Natasha. A deadly Natasha meant that you were as good as dead. 

Natasha didn’t say anything until she started driving. 

“What the hell were you thinking?” she demanded in a soft but furious tone. 

“I don’t know,” Clint sighed, wishing he could just curl up into a little ball and disappear. “I just saw something you guys didn’t and had to – ”

“Mess up the whole case?” Natasha finished, clutching the steering wheel until her knuckles turned white. “How do you plan on getting out of this situation?”

“I don’t know,” Clint said again. 

“Well, you better think of something quickly, because you’re not coming in again tomorrow,” Natasha replied, lips set in a tight line. 

“But Nat! I’m helping! I’m actually working on the case!” Clint protested. “And it’ll be even worse if I run away now! They’ll think that _I’m_ the murderer! They’ll do some more digging and find that Barney is the FBI agent, not me, and then they’ll find out that my visitor’s badge is actually stolen! There’ll be a manhunt for me!”

“They wouldn’t need to do a full out manhunt to find you,” Natasha snorted. 

“Just let me help solve the case, and then when we catch the real culprit, I can say I’m being transferred back to LA or something,” Clint said, trying to placate her. “That way if they do find out I was lying they’ll at least know I’m not the murderer, because the killer will already be in custody.” 

“By extending the time you hang out around the FBI, the more likely you are to get caught,” Natasha reasoned, turning onto the street that her apartment was on. “If you’d just – ”

However, she stopped talking when her apartment building came into view. In front of it was a series of police cars along with a couple of FBI vans. Officers were milling about in front and gawking onlookers were held back by bright yellow police tape. Natasha pulled up to the curb a little ways down the block, getting out and striding towards the nearest officer. Clint scrambled out of the car afterwards, jogging slightly to catch up. 

“What’s going on here?” Natasha demanded, frowning at the police officer in front of her. 

However, before the officer could answer, another sharper, more slippery looking man walked up to Natasha. 

“Agent Romanov,” he greeted in an impersonal, almost cold, tone. 

“Agent Laufeyson,” she replied, although it sounded more like a challenge than an acknowledgement. “Would you care to tell me what’s happened to my apartment building.” 

“I’m afraid I can’t give you all the details,” Laufeyson said, not sounding at all regretful, “but I can tell you that _this_ was found in your apartment.” 

He held up a small gun with a silencer on it. 

“You know, in New York it’s illegal to own a silencer,” Laufeyson said slowly, his shrewd eyes boring into Natasha’s unflinching glare. “The serial number also appears to have been filed off.”

“It’s not mine,” Natasha asserted, frown deepening. 

“I should hope not,” Laufeyson replied, not sounding terribly hopeful. “Especially considering the clip is missing four bullets.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Natasha has been framed, four agents are dead, and... how long will it be until a fifth shows up? 
> 
> Trigger Warnings! Past rape and some mention of gore. Neither are terribly graphic, but they're certainly more than just a hint.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some good questions from allochthon and weepingnaiad (and their answers!) from chapter one:
> 
> Q: Is Clint a "non-traditional" student? A standard undergrad would be way too young to pull off impersonating an agent?
> 
> A: Actually, he's not. See, you have to be 23 to join the FBI, and Clint's 20 - nearly 21. He could certainly pass for a very new agent. Also, don't underestimate the power of context. 
> 
> Q(uibble): The only quibble I have is that they'd know for sure if the agents had been shot elsewhere (blood splatter) so I don't think anyone would suggest that they were killed any where but where they were found. They'd also know if the bodies had been moved, so it makes sense that the bullet holes in the windows were done after the fact.
> 
> A: Actually, high velocity blood splatter like that produced by a gunshot wound can be mimicked just by taking a paintbrush and flicking the bristles so that the blood/paint sprays off of it. Also, you can't tell if a body's been moved until 8-12 hours after the person's been killed (that's when livor mortis becomes set - decoloration of the body due to blood pooling based on gravity). So it's entirely possible for them to not have known if the body was moved soon enough.

Clint had known Natasha for four years. He’d met her his sophomore year in high school – and it wasn’t a particularly good first meeting. After all, it had started with him puking up blood onto her new stilettos. She’d frowned at him, but seemed hardly fazed by the sloppy red gunk on her shoes. Instead, she’d helped prop him up on a chair and asked him what the hell he was doing in a shady club when he barely looked a day older than sixteen. 

(It wasn’t until a few weeks later that he admitted to her that he was fifteen. It was only a year’s difference, but people always thought he was older than he was.)

When she offered to take him to a hospital, he’d spat more blood onto her dress and told her to fuck off – that it was none of her business. She’d grabbed his chin, forced him to make eye contact with her and told him, very slowly, that it _was_ her damn business, because if he died, she’d be the one examining his cold corpse the next morning. Clint had reluctantly told her that she could take him to the ER, but he wasn’t going to tell her a goddamn thing about himself or why he was coughing up blood. She’d looked irritated, but agreed. After getting checked out at the ER and lifting some pain meds, Clint had escaped out a back door. 

They met again three days later. Clint only knows this because when he woke up in a hospital bed, the doctor asked him a lot of questions about the strange red headed woman who’d dropped him off in the ER with only a few curt words and then left. Clint told the doctor he had no clue who she was. It was true, after all. 

The third time, Natasha saved him. He supposed that she’d saved him before, too, but this time was the one Clint always thought of as the first time she’d rescued him. He’d been playing darts – hustling again – playing risky with increasingly dangerous people. This time he wasn’t able to slip out of the corner he’d backed himself into and he was forced out into an alleyway, scratching bloody lines into a man’s thighs as he choked on the guy’s cock. 

Then he’d suddenly found himself gasping in sweet oxygen again as the man was pulled backwards and knocked out by nimble fists and sharp high-heels. Natasha had checked him over methodically as he tried to contain himself – willing the tears to not spill from his eyes. He’d been numb enough that Natasha had no trouble maneuvering him into the passenger seat of her cherry red sports car. When the car had stopped again, Clint had regained his senses enough to send himself into another panic attack, clawing at the car door, trying to escape. 

Natasha had calmed him down with surprisingly tender caresses, her gun callused hands stroking his hair and wiping salty tears from the corners of his eyes. When he’d calmed down again, he’d realized that she hadn’t taken him to the hospital like he’d assumed. Instead the car was parked in front of a small apartment building – not necessarily run down, but certainly not what he’d expected with the fancy BMW she had. 

Natasha had then asked him, slowly and carefully, if he wanted her to bring him to the police station. Clint was shaking his head before she’d even finished her question. Natasha pursed her lips in discontent, but he could tell that she’d been expecting that answer. She’d then told him that if that was the case, he had to come up to her apartment and let her check him over for injuries. He’d reluctantly agreed. 

He’d stayed the whole night, sitting at her kitchen table, clutching a mug of hot chocolate so hard he was half expecting it to break and telling her all the reasons why it would be a shitty idea for him to press charges, even if his… assailant… hadn’t already disappeared. Natasha had looked at him with eyes that understood. He’d loved her since that moment. 

He’d never been _in love_ with her, but he loved her.

And now he was watching her through one way glass, looking more broken down and weary than he’d ever seen her. No one else could tell. Of course they couldn’t – this was Natasha, who he was half convinced was a secret Russian spy. But the tilt of her gaze, the set of her jaw, told Clint all he needed to know about what she was actually feeling. Clint wanted to break the glass in frustration. Couldn’t they fucking see that it wasn’t Natasha? That Natasha wasn’t the killer?

“Agent Barton,” a steady voice greeted, calming Clint slightly. 

“Agent Coulson,” he replied, not bothering to turn away from the window, his eyes still fixated on Natasha as the other agent – Laufeyson, he believed – questioned Natasha in ways that made his skin crawl. 

“What are you doing here at this hour?” the other agent (the _real_ agent) asked, moving to stand beside Clint. “I thought you left an hour ago.” 

“Na – Agent Romanov offered to drive me home, as we live in the same general area,” Clint said, not admitting that he actually practically lived with Natasha. “Then Laufeyson came along and I, ah, decided to tag along.”

“You can call her Natasha, you know. If she’s allowed you to, that is,” Coulson told him, smiling slightly. “Although I really thought you two hated each other this morning.” 

“We’ve gotten everything straightened out,” Clint lied, still not taking his eyes off of Natasha. “We’ve bonded. At least somewhat.” 

“I’ve never known Romanov to bond that quickly,” Agent Coulson said, giving Clint an odd look. “How’d you manage it?” 

“Let’s just say I know a thing or two about shitty childhoods,” Clint replied, proud that the words didn’t catch in his throat. 

“Ah,” Coulson said, his gaze softening slightly. 

“You know, I wasn’t aware that Agent Laufeyson was on this case,” Clint said abruptly, changing the topic. “I didn’t see him at all earlier.” 

“Well, he’s not officially on the case,” Coulson answered, respectfully not acknowledging the obviousness of the conversation’s change in direction. “His main focus is organized crime and he took over the case that Agent Morse was working on before she was killed.”

“What’s he doing snooping around Natasha’s place, then?” Clint asked, more anger seeping into his voice than was probably professional. 

“He did have a search warrant,” Coulson informed him calmly. “I’m afraid I don’t know all the details, though.” 

“Can I talk to her for a minute?” Clint asked, finally looking over at Coulson. “Just for a moment.” 

“Probably, but you should probably ask Laufeyson first,” Coulson said, his eyes sweeping over Clint, looking for something, but what Clint couldn’t tell. “He has a certain way of doing things that can be… _difficult_ at times.” 

Clint nodded, still staring into Coulson’s bright blue eyes, trying to read something – anything – in his expression. Trying to figure out where he stood on his opinion of Natasha. Trying to figure out what made him tick. Trying to figure out what it was about him that made Clint want to trust him in a way he hadn’t trusted anyone since that first night in Natasha’s apartment. 

He was broken out of that strange trance by the door to the interrogation room opening, Laufeyson stepping out, his expression carefully neutral. However, there was a certain look to him, to his expression, that made anger bubble up under Clint’s skin. He looked _satisfied_. Smug, almost. 

Clint had never wanted to punch someone more in his life. He thought of Natasha and her ‘What sort of idiot are you?’ look and refrained. 

“Uh, hey, Agent Laufeyson, right?” Clint began, stepping away from Coulson and towards the slippery looking agent. “You wouldn’t mind if I – ”

“Ah, you must be Agent Barton,” Laufeyson said with a smile that made Clint’s skin crawl. “I’ve heard a lot about the little stunt you pulled this morning. I’d be quite humbled by your wit if it wasn’t for how you immediately attached yourself to that mewling quim, Romanov.” 

“What the fuck did you just – ” Clint snapped, only to be cut off by Agent Coulson stepping in front of him, hand on his shoulder and standing nearly nose to nose with Laufeyson. 

“Laufeyson,” he snapped, in a way that made Clint unconsciously stand to attention. “Next time I hear you making sexist comments, I’ll report you to Director Fury. This is your second strike.” 

Agent Laufeyson’s twisted into something ugly for a moment before relaxing again, his mask slipping back into place, though his eyes were still icy as he looked at Agent Coulson. He turned his back to them and was about to leave, but Clint impulsively grabbed his sleeve, stopping him. 

“Agent Laufeyson,” he started, trying to sound marginally respectful, despite how he wanted to stick and arrow through the guy’s eye socket. “Sorry, but would you mind if I interviewed Agent Romanov for a bit? I just want to – ”

“I’ve already asked her every pertinent question,” Laufeyson interrupted, scowling at Clint. “There’s no need for you to repeat it all.”

“Well, sometimes a second opinion – ” Clint started, trying to be patient with Laufeyson. 

“Is unnecessary,” Laufeyson said, waving him off. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a case to solve.” 

Clint kept his mouth firmly shut, his jaw clenched, as Laufeyson strode out of the room in an arrogant swoop. It was decided – he fucking hated that guy. Arrogant, misogynistic prick. Clint hoped that he’d trip on his own ego and break his fucking neck. 

(Clint wasn’t terribly shy about his violent tendencies – he just didn’t express them overtly very often.)

“That fucking piece of – ” Clint spat, the words getting caught in his throat as range welled up inside his chest. 

“Laufeyson’s a good agent,” Coulson said carefully, causing Clint to glare at him. “He’s just not a good person.”

“Tell me something I don’t already know,” Clint muttered, tearing his gaze away from Coulson to look back at Natasha, who was still sitting in the stark white room, a mask of boredom covering her true anxiety. 

The tension seeping through Clint’s body intensified as he heard Coulson let out a tired sigh. Like he knew the first fucking thing about this situation. They needed to get Natasha out of the goddamned room right that instant. He could practically _see_ it draining the life out of her. Natasha had never been as open about her past as Clint was (which was quite a feat, considering Clint would rather shoot his own brains out than tell anybody about the majority of shit he’d been through), but from what little he’d heard, rooms that locked from the outside were a huge no-no. Just seeing her trapped made him want to scream. 

“Barton,” Coulson’s voice barked, breaking Clint out of his thoughts and making him realize just how closely pressed to the one way glass he was. “Calm down. I can practically see you shattering the glass with your mind.” 

“If only I actually could,” Clint muttered, his short nails scratching at the glass. 

“Look, just go in and talk to Romanov already,” Coulson sighed, surprising Clint. “Asking Laufeyson was really just a formality. I’ll keep an eye out for him, in case he decides to come back.” 

“You’d really…?” Clint asked, staring at Coulson now, a little slack jawed. 

“I trust that you’re not going to go ballistic and start throwing chairs or something,” Coulson replied, rolling his eyes.

“I just,” Clint started, still staring at Coulson. “I kind of expected you to be a little more… strict about these kinds of things.” 

“I believe in doing things the way that get them done to the best quality,” Coulson said simply, and although he wasn’t actually smiling, Clint could tell that internally he was. “And don’t assume you know things about people you’ve only just met as of this morning. You’ve got a lot to learn.” 

“Ah, yeah,” Clint replied, a little embarrassed. “Well, I’ll just… you know. Go talk to Natasha now.”

“You do that,” Coulson said. 

He was totally internally laughing at Clint right now. Clint turned his back to him and pushed open the door to the interrogation room, squinting slightly at the harshness of the light bouncing off of the bright white paint coating the walls and barren metal table. Clint would say that Natasha looked even worse now that he could see her more closely, but Natasha was never anything but perfectly put together, even when she was trapped in something of a nightmare. 

“Hey,” he said softly, for lack of any other suitable opening line. Nothing witty was coming to mind. 

Natasha snorted and cracked the barest hint of a smile. 

“Hey to you to,” she said, a little louder than Clint’s own tone. A little stronger. “Anyone else listening?”

“Well, Agent Coulson’s on the other side of the glass, but Agent Laufeyson already stalked off in a huff,” Clint answered, moving to sit in the unoccupied chair across the table from Natasha. “The speakers are turned off though – I don’t think Laufeyson wanted us hearing his interrogation of you.” 

“Typical,” she muttered, and Clint could see her relaxing slightly at the knowledge that Laufeyson was no longer listening, analyzing her every word. 

“He’s a piece of work, isn’t he?” Clint said lightly. 

“He’s also a sexist bastard who can’t accept that it’s the twenty first century,” Natasha said, grimacing slightly. “I would be completely content with sending him back to Shakespearian times. He’d probably enjoy it a lot more.” 

“I can totally see him rocking those ugly-ass ruffled collars,” Clint replied, cracking a slight grin at the mental image. 

“You are so mature,” Natasha sighed, rolling her eyes. 

Clint’s grin widened. It wasn’t often he managed to get her to do that. She must really hate Laufeyson. 

“Now,” Natasha continued, bringing Clint back down to earth and the important matter at hand, “I think we have some issues we need to discuss. Most importantly, what we’re going to do about your stupid predicament.” 

“Personally, I think the more important issue is how we’re going to prove your innocence and get you out of here,” Clint protested, grin disappearing. 

Natasha opened her mouth to retort, but Clint held up a hand to stop her. 

“ _Don’t_ protest,” he said, frowning at her. “Look, I know you’re innocent. There’s no way you’d be able to hide something like that from me, and I _know_ that that gun’s not yours. You’d never have filed off the serial number so sloppily.”

Natasha smirked smugly. 

“I do think that I should stay on this case, though,” Clint continued, his words wiping away Natasha’s smirk. “While Laufeyson is busy chasing red herrings, I can look into the real killer. I think I might be able to sway Coulson, too.” 

“How? By batting your eyelashes at him and looking pretty?” Natasha scoffed, causing Clint to blush. “Don’t think I haven’t noticed how you’re making doe eyes at him.” 

“No – I just – I think he trusts my judgment,” Clint said, trying not to think about Coulson’s very blue eyes. “And he’s certainly sharp. He’ll realize Laufeyson’s leads are hopeless quickly enough.” 

“Your crush is adorable, but you’re going to have a really tough time seducing Coulson,” Natasha quipped, giving Clint her ‘Oh, you’re hopeless’ look. “He’s nothing if not professional. That, and he has a strong sense of justice. He’ll probably feel like a cradle robber if he starts dating you.” 

“I’m not _that_ young,” Clint protested, his cheeks flushing again. 

“Clint, you’re twenty,” Natasha said, raising a perfect eyebrow at him. “You’re just barely out of teenager-dom.” 

“You know I’m older than that,” Clint said softly.

“Mentally, for the most part,” Natasha conceded. “But physically? You’re twenty. I know you feel older because of all the shit you’ve been through, but sometimes you need to stop pretending that you’re older than you are, because you’re _not_ , Clint. As cliché as it is, there _are_ actually some things that come with age, and you are still very young.” 

“Tasha – ” Clint started, but he cut himself off as the door opened, Coulson sticking his head through. 

“Laufeyson’s heading back this way,” he informed them, his eyes flicking between Clint and Natasha, nothing how close together they were, leaning across the table. “We should probably leave.” 

Clint nodded curtly before giving Natasha a long look. He stood up from his chair and followed Coulson out of the oppressing room, back into the main office area, carefully not making eye contact with Laufeyson, although he could feel the agent’s eyes boring into him uncomfortably. 

“You should go home now,” Coulson said suddenly, once Laufeyson had walked past them. 

“What? No,” Clint blurted, surprised at Agent Coulson’s words. “We have work to do! I can’t just leave – ”

“Yes, you can. And you will,” Coulson said, herding him subtly towards the exit. “You’ve already done enough work for today, and it’s already past eight pm. I need you sharp for tomorrow.”

“But I could – ”

“Barton, go home,” Coulson ordered. “I’m going home too. There’s really not much we can do until Laufeyson is finished with Romanov. The real work will begin tomorrow morning.” 

“Fine,” Clint muttered, his shoulders slumping slightly. 

“I can drive you home, if you need me to,” Coulson said suddenly, making Clint blink in surprise. “It’s getting a little late, and while the subway is a lot safer than it used to be, you probably don’t know the city very well, considering you just moved here. I don’t want you to get mugged or something.”

“Uh, thanks,” Clint said, trying not to blush again. “You can just drop me off at Natasha’s place.” 

“Okay,” Coulson replied, nodding. “I can do that.” 

Clint smiled slightly and followed Coulson out to the parking lot. He actually knew the subway system like back of his own hand, but that would look kind of strange, considering he was supposed to be from LA. Plus, this way he got to spend a little more time with Coulson. He could probably just crash at Natasha’s place for the night, provided it wasn’t marked off as a crime scene. And if it was, there was a subway stop close enough to Natasha’s place – he could get back to his dorm easily enough. 

The car ride was mostly silent. It wasn’t an awkward silence, though. Quite the opposite, in fact. It was comfortable, almost familiar. It was a little like when he and Natasha took naps together on cold winter days. There was nothing sexual about it – just a feeling of warm security. 

Okay, so maybe he was a little disappointed that all he was getting from Coulson at this point was “warm security” but it’d do for now. Natasha had made a good point – there was no way they’d be able to form a proper relationship with the mess that Clint had gotten himself into, but Coulson was still really attractive. True, he wasn’t that good at no strings attached relationships, but it wasn’t like he was ever going to see Coulson again after this case. That should make things easier. 

Clint then realized that the car had come to a stop. He glanced out the window and saw Natasha’s small apartment building, a little disappointed that he had to leave Coulson now. He unbuckled his seatbelt and hopped out of the car, turning back to Coulson for a moment. 

“Well, I guess I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said, a small smile on his face. 

“See you then,” Coulson replied, a small smile of his own adorning his handsome face. 

Clint waited until he’d driven off to enter Natasha’s apartment building and was pleased to find that Natasha’s apartment had not in fact been plastered over with yellow police tape. He unlocked the door with the spare key Natasha had given him a few years ago, slipping into the living room. He was a little surprised to find everything neatly placed approximately where it had been that morning. He’d half expected the entire apartment to be turned upside down by the agents who had searched it. Huh. 

He walked into the kitchen and checked Natasha’s cupboards, searching for something edible and easy to cook. He pulled out some Chinese food left over from two days ago and heated it up, quickly devouring it. When he was finished he checked the clock again to find that it was only nine thirty. Well, he was feeling pretty tired from everything that had happened that day. It was kind of early to go to bed, but he was pretty sure he’d need to be well rested for tomorrow. He grabbed the extra pajamas he kept in the coat closet and was about to crash on the sofa when he remembered that Natasha wouldn’t be home later. Might as well take the bed. 

\---

Clint took the subway the next morning and arrived at the office half an hour early. He was surprised to find Coulson already there, looking like he’d been there for at least an hour already, buried in paperwork. 

“How long have you been here?” Clint blurted out, his brain not quite catching up to his mouth. “I’d accuse you of staying here all night if I hadn’t seen you drive home myself.” 

“I’ve only been here for an hour and a half, Barton,” Coulson said in his usual deadpan, although there was a slight humor beneath it. 

“Did you not eat breakfast or something?” Clint asked, settling himself down in the swivel chair at Woo’s – his – desk, conveniently placed next to Coulson’s. 

“Stark always brings in extra coffee and donuts to ‘make up for being late’,” Coulson said, not looking up from the autopsy report he was reading. 

“Is that your ultimate weakness? Donuts?” Clint asked teasingly. 

“Yes,” Coulson replied, not missing a beat. 

Clint grinned. He shook his head slightly and turned back to his desk, starting up the computer, opening the new manila folder lying on the desk and beginning to read. It was Laufeyson’s file on Natasha. Just beginning to read it made Clint’s skin want to crawl off, and he couldn’t help but image Laufeyson’s oily voice reading it aloud. 

A good half of what was written in it was utter BS, psychological profiling about Natasha’s tendency to violence based on the number of fleeing suspects she’d shot, shit about how she was deceptive and “resistant to questioning,” and more about her supposed “cold” relations with Quartermain and Strzeszewski. He clearly didn’t understand a damn thing about Natasha. 

However, Clint was reluctant to admit that there were a couple of valid points in the report. Natasha didn’t have solid alibis for any of the four murders, which wasn’t that surprising, considering how solitary a person she was. Clint spent quite a bit of his time with Natasha, but they weren’t _always_ together. It was a really annoying coincidence that _all_ of the murders happened when Clint was out. 

The whole thing about the gun, though – that was preposterous to anyone who knew even a little bit about Natasha. Agent Laufeyson had reportedly found it in her bedside table drawer. If Natasha _did_ have an illegal gun (and Clint knew for a fact that she did) she wouldn’t put it in such an exposed spot (and clearly Laufeyson hadn’t found the others). 

It would be easy to blame Laufeyson for the gun – say that he was planting evidence, but Clint really didn’t have any proof of that. It was all based on the fact the he didn’t like Laufeyson, and he gave Clint the creeps. Clint had long ago learned that just because someone was an ass didn’t mean that they were a criminal, and just because someone was nice didn’t mean that they were innocent. He’d been screwed over by enough of those situations already. 

He’d still be keeping an eye on Laufeyson, though. 

“So, what do you think?” Coulson asked, motioning at the folder Clint was reading through. 

“I think…” Clint started, trailing off. 

He couldn’t very well say ‘I think that there’s no way Natasha would do this’ considering he was only supposed to have known her for one day. 

“I think that a lot of this evidence is based on circumstance,” Clint finished, glancing over at Coulson. “I mean, silencers are illegal and the clip was missing four bullets, but without knowing exactly what type of bullets the victims were shot with we can’t really say anything. There also aren’t any fingerprints on the gun – ”

“And I would not expect anything less if the gun was owned, illegally, by a federal agent,” Coulson pointed out. “If Natasha was the killer, she certainly wouldn’t be stupid enough to leave fingerprints on the murder weapon, no matter how secure she believed it to be.” 

“Well, if she was so cautious, then why did she leave it lying around in her bedside table drawer?” Clint shot back, resisting the urge to scowl at Coulson. “That sounds pretty sloppy to me.” 

“She clearly hadn’t expected her house to be searched,” Coulson said, forcing Clint to tamp down on his defensiveness again in order to not appear suspicious. “She did not have any reason to believe that someone would have an opportunity to find it.”

“But don’t you think it’s possible that – ” Clint started again, only to be cut off by Coulson. 

“Why are you so determined to defend Agent Romanov?” he asked, giving Clint a calculating look. 

“Because… I just don’t think she did it,” Clint answered weakly. 

“I know that you somehow bonded with Romanov yesterday,” Coulson began, a tired look settling onto his face, “and I’d like to believe that she’s a good person, but there have been some… incidents.”

“What sort of incidents?” Clint asked, although a part of him felt like he was betraying Natasha. 

“Well, she’s shot more suspects than any other agent in the New York office,” Coulson answered, his lips pressed into a grim line. “She’s quick to shoot, and while all of the shots that she’s made have been deemed necessary after being reviewed, I’m still not entirely comfortable with that fact.” 

“If she didn’t make the shots, someone else would have, right?” Clint questioned. “Why should it matter that it was her who made the shots? It just means she’s alert.”

“In this line of work, ‘alert’ is a euphemism for ‘paranoid,’” Coulson corrected. “And no, we don’t know if the other agents would have made those shots. The suspects might have just escaped instead.” 

“But she caught them,” Clint protested. “That’s good. Maybe her methods were a little unorthodox, but she stopped them, and that’s what counts, right?” 

“Not all the time,” Coulson replied, giving Clint a calculating look. “Our job is to stop crime with minimal violence, minimal lies – basically with minimal criminal activity. The more we let our agents run wild, the more we become like the people we’re catching.”

Clint was silent. He wasn’t entirely sure how to respond to that. Sure, it made sense, but both he and Natasha had grown up in a world where cops were the enemy, where the law didn’t protect a damn thing, and where the police philosophy was that only good criminal was a dead one. It was… strange to hear someone refute those truths. 

“And there have been other troubling incidents, too,” Coulson continued. “For example, the first year after she transferred here from Chicago, she apparently knocked out a guy at a bar and drove off with the kid he was having some sort of fight with. There were no records of her ever dropping the kid off at a hospital or at a police station, and the only reason a more thorough investigation wasn’t done was because the guy she knocked out decided to drop all charges after we started interviewing some of the other bar patrons.” 

“How do you know she didn’t offer to take the kid to the hospital or police station?” Clint blurted, blood pounding in his ears, his heart beating a mile a minute as he tried to settling his breathing, remembering the way he’d choked… “Maybe he begged her not to. Maybe he ran away. Maybe he – ”

“Maybe he did,” Coulson interrupted, “but that doesn’t change the fact that she knocked out a civilian and didn’t say why she did it other than ‘he was hurting a kid.’ Even if that was the truth, there were plenty of other ways she could have handled the situation.” 

“Maybe that was the only way she could get him to stop,” Clint said softly, in a tone that he wasn’t sure Coulson would be able to hear. 

“Look, Romanov’s past aside, she’s still looking like the most likely suspect,” Coulson sighed, not making any acknowledgement of Clint’s last comment. “She has no alibis, she has an unauthorized gun, she knew all of the killed agents at least in passing, and she was even the last person seen with Agent Morse before she died.”

“But _why_ would she do it?” Clint asked, his voice slightly strained. “Where’s her motive?”

“She had both means and opportunity,” Coulson said, shaking his head. “Motive can be used to help prove a crime, but a lack of motive is rarely enough to disprove one.”

“I’ve always thought that that was stupid,” Clint muttered. 

“Motive starts getting into iffy areas of psychology,” Coulson said, shrugging. “We don’t know enough about the way human minds work for that to be as scientifically valid yet.”

“But eyewitnesses are?” Clint scoffed. “You can’t get more subjective than some little old lady with cataracts swearing up and down that she saw some nasty teenage boy who once stepped on her cat’s tail break a shop window.” 

“I’m afraid that’s just the way it works,” Coulson said, a wry smile on his face. 

“It’s stupid,” Clint repeated. “What’s Agent Laufeyson going to do with Natasha until then?”

“She’s under house arrest until he collects more precise evidence or she confesses,” Coulson answered, opening up his own copy of Laufeyson’s report. “Or until we find the actual killer.”

“How long could that – ” Clint started, until Coulson’s last words caught up with him. “Wait, you also don’t think that – ”

“Friend Barton! Friend Coulson!” a loud voice boomed suddenly, interrupting Clint’s question. “I have obtained the information concerning the distance our noble colleagues were shot at!”

“Hello to you too,” Clint muttered, before raising his voice so that the gigantic blonde could hear him. “That’s great Agent Od – er, Thor. What’d you find?” 

“It is entirely possible that they were shot with a smaller gun,” Thor said, nodding solemnly. “In fact, it is more likely that it was a smaller gun at a shorter distance. The medical examiners had assumed that the bullet did not leave the body due to loss of momentum after hitting the glass, but now that it has been established that the bullets did not, in fact, travel through glass, that theory does not hold. Smaller caliber bullets, on the contrary, tend to lodge inside the body without passing all the way through.”

“So they could have been shot anywhere,” Clint sighed, scrubbing a hand across his face in frustration. 

Solving crimes always seemed simpler on TV shows. 

“Would this gun be small enough?” Coulson asked, holding up a picture of the gun that Laufeyson had found in Natasha’s apartment. (Or, at least, he’d _claimed_ that he’d found it there…) 

Thor took the picture from the more senior agent, looking it over carefully. He held it a little closer to his face, squinting slightly, probably taking in the filed off serial number. 

“Is this weapon .22 caliber?” he asked, wanting to make sure his observations were correct. 

“Yes, it is,” Coulson answered, nodding but not giving up any more information. 

“Then yes. It appears to be capable of the horrendous murders. Does this mean you already have brought the dastardly killer to justice?” Thor asked, looking at Coulson hopefully. 

“Not unless they’re Agent Romanov,” Coulson replied grimly, taking the photograph back from Thor. 

“Noble Agent Romanov?” Thor boomed, clearly surprised. “She would not commit such a crime!”

“Well, your brother seems to think she did,” Coulson said, “and he’s gathered some interesting evidence to go along with his theory.” 

“Wait – Laufeyson’s your _brother?_ ” Clint exclaimed, staring at Thor wide eyed. “No way!”

“Yes way,” Coulson muttered dryly as Thor nodded in affirmation. 

“He’s adopted,” Thor said a little weakly, “but he’s still my brother. He’s a good person. He can just be a little harsh on occasion.” 

Clint closed his mouth and carefully did not make any further comments on Laufeyson – Thor’s brother. He had absolutely no clue how such a kind, if slightly overwhelming, person could be related to such a slippery slime ball. Maybe Thor was a little old fashioned in his speech patterns and such, but he didn’t strike Clint as nearly as Middle Ages suited as Agent Laufeyson. 

“Where is the lovely Agent Romanov now?” Thor asked, a concerned look on his face. “Loki is not holding her in a prison cell, is he?” 

“She’s under house arrest,” Coulson answered. 

Hearing that affirmation again made Clint’s skin prickle in outrage, but this time some of the other implications of what Coulson had said caught up with him. Shit. Well, it looked like he wasn’t going to be crashing on Tasha’s couch for a while. His bow was in her hall closet, too. With the way they’d be monitoring her, there was no way he’d be able to take it out to do any practicing. He supposed he could still go visit her, though, considering he was an FBI agent now. Or, at least, everyone thought he was an FBI agent. It would look kind of suspicious if he visited her too often, though, considering they were supposed to have just met. He was probably already beginning to tip Agent Coulson off due to how much he was insisting that Natasha was innocent. 

“I will go and speak to her and my brother at once!” Thor boomed again, a determined set to his shoulders. “Surely he will come to see the grievous mistake he has made! Hopefully Agent Romanov will be gracious enough to accept our sincerest apologies.” 

Clint didn’t think it would go quite as Thor had planned, but he didn’t stop the large blonde agent and he swept back out of the room, his long coat swishing behind him a little bit like a cape. Huh. Maybe Thor was a little bit more medieval than Clint gave him credit for. He did seem a little bit like he’d escaped from a children’s fairytale.

Once Thor was out of sight, Clint turned back to Coulson, a little startled to see that he’d somehow already returned to work without Clint noticing. For him it was a little strange not to notice something. He was used to noticing everything, except when it came to Natasha. She was the one person he couldn’t always notice everything about, and somehow it seemed that Coulson had the same talent. Interesting. Maybe he was a secret Russian spy, too. 

“You don’t think Natasha’s guilty,” Clint said after a moment, noticing the minute pause in Coulson’s reading as the words registered. 

“When did I say that?” he asked casually, not looking at Clint. 

“You said that Laufeyson would let Natasha go once we found the ‘actual’ killer,” Clint said, remembering Coulson’s last words before Thor had interrupted. 

“I just meant that she’d be released if it was proven that she wasn’t the murderer,” Coulson replied, still not looking over at Clint. “There’s a difference.”

“Yeah, there is a difference,” Clint agreed, scooting his chair so that he was close enough to touch Coulson, “and if you meant what you just said, then that’s what you would have said. But you said ‘actual’ killer.” 

“Look, Barton, I know that you’ve gotten it into your head that Agent Romanov is innocent, but at this point we honestly can’t be sure,” Coulson said, flipping to the next page of Laufeyson’s report. “If you can’t remain objective then I might be forced to assign you to a different case.” 

“But Agent Coulson – ” Clint started, only to be cut off by Coulson. 

“If you’re really going to insist on sticking to that train of thought than we can discuss it on the drive home,” Coulson said, giving Clint a hard stare. “I don’t want you wasting my work hours.”

Clint blinked. Coulson hadn’t driven him that morning – he’d taken the subway. Why would Coulson say that they were carpooling when – Oh. _Oh._ He was kind of an idiot, wasn’t he? Of course Coulson didn’t want other people overhearing this conversation, most of all Laufeyson who was probably still stalking around somewhere terrorizing people or something.

Clint shut his mouth and turned back to the report he was reading, ducking his head to try and hide the way his cheeks had colored in embarrassment. Well, he could certainly see what Natasha meant by him still being painfully young. Spending time pretending to be an FBI agent showed him at every turn just how much he still had to learn. He could be patient when he wanted to – he’d once spent six hours straight hiding under a desk, stock still until his father had fallen asleep – but somehow this case had completely screwed with his emotions and was making him jumpier than a scared rabbit. 

He sighed and continued reading the file, thoroughly looking through it before sighing and setting it aside. Like he’d said before, Laufeyson did have some regrettably valid points, such as how Romanov had been the main homicide division agent who’d been collaborating with Morse’s team on the human trafficking ring case she’d been working on before Bobbi had been killed. She’d also requested Strzeszewski’s help on the same case soon prior to his death when she’d needed help hacking into a victim’s laptop because Stark was busy with some sort of board meeting. She’d also apparently talked to Quartermain a bit about the case Bobbi had been working on the day before he was killed. And then, obviously, she’d been working on the Morse case alongside Woo. It really wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to conclude that she was trying to cover up something related to the case Bobbi had been working on. 

It was still just circumstantial, though. Clint was sure that, with time, he could find a way to disprove it. He only hoped he had enough time to do such. 

The day seemed to fly by for Clint, passing by in a blur of case files and background checks, reading interviews from witnesses in Bobbi’s neighborhood that had been collected yesterday, and sipping coffee received from Stark that had hours ago gone cold. It was rather soothing to have Coulson working alongside him, though, quickly falling into a rhythm that seemed to be ingrained in the older man. Others flitted in and out of the office: Stark, Thor, Sitwell, Hill. Rogers popped in for a little while but left quickly to talk with some connection they had with the local police force. (Detective Barnes, or something like that.) Clint kept expecting Natasha to stride in confidently the way she’d done the day before, but she never did. 

Clint spent much of his lunch break discussing the case in further detail with Coulson, although occasionally the conversation would stray, trailing off into endearing personal anecdotes and teasing tidbits about hobbies, likes and dislikes, pet peeves, etc. More than once Clint found himself staring at Coulson for a little too long. He wasn’t sure if Coulson had noticed it yet, but if he did, he didn’t make any comments. 

By the time they wrapped up it was nearly seven o’clock. Clint suspected that he should have felt exhausted and drained, but instead he felt an odd sort of giddy adrenaline flowing through his body, anticipating the conversation with Coulson on the ride home. Well, to Natasha’s home, but that was practically his home anyway… 

Damn. He’d forgotten that Natasha was on house arrest at the moment and that he wouldn’t be able to crash on her couch that night. He’d have to take the subway back to his little dorm room, then. That wasn’t going to be fun. He’d actually have to buy his own dinner instead of just raiding Natasha’s fridge like usual. 

Clint was broken out of his thoughts as he came up to Coulson’s nondescript black car, climbing in once Coulson had unlocked the doors and buckling his seatbelt securely before turning to look at the older man again. Clint was a little surprised to see a bit of Coulson’s professional mask slip as he relaxed, clearly more comfortable in the familiar leather seats of his car. Clint idly wondered what Coulson looked like with no mask at all, completely relaxed. Clint wondered if he could ever make that happen. 

They drove in silence for a few minutes until they were a ways away from the FBI office. Clint closed his eyes during that short period of time, letting himself melt back into the soft passenger seat of the car, the hairs on the back of his neck standing up slightly as the cool leather touched his bare skin. 

“You’re right that I don’t think that Romanov’s the killer,” Coulson said, breaking the silence. “She’s a little rough around the edges, but she wouldn’t kill someone without a good reason. She’s never kill if there was another option. Harm, yes, but kill…”

“I’m glad someone else understands that,” Clint said a little quietly. 

“What I don’t understand, though,” Coulson continued, “is how you managed to get Romanov to spill her guts to you after only knowing you for a day. Out of all of the agents in our office, I know the most about her, and even then there’s no way she’d trust me the way she trusts you. Just watching you two in the interrogation room made that very clear.” 

“Ah, well, we – ” Clint started, unsure exactly how to respond. 

“I don’t want you to tell me that bullshit about bonding over your childhoods again,” Coulson said, and there was a bit of a bite to his tone. “There’s no way Romanov would trust you to easily just by swapping childhood stories. In fact, I don’t even think Romanov would swap childhood stories.” 

“I…” Clint trailed off, biting his lip. “We’ve actually met each other before.” 

“And why did you feel the need to hide that fact?” Coulson asked, not taking his eyes off the road. 

“Because I’ve been staying at her place for a while already and it would look kind of suspicious if everyone found out that I’d arrived just before the murders started,” Clint lied, hoping he sounded sincere. “I came a bit early because I haven’t quite found a place to stay yet, and I was hoping to find a decent apartment before I started at the FBI office. Natasha offered to let me crash on her couch until I found somewhere.”

Coulson was silent for a moment. Clint chewed at his bottom lip again and prayed to whatever god was listening that he’d believe the lie. It wasn’t entirely a lie – he really had known Natasha for a while and it would look suspicious if they found out he’d been hanging around with Natasha prior to the murders. He also did crash on her couch more often than not. 

“I suppose this means you don’t have a place right now, do you?” Coulson asked, the question taking Clint off guard. 

“What?” Clint said, blinking. 

“Because Natasha’s currently under house arrest you can’t stay at her apartment,” Coulson clarified. 

“Well, I suppose I could get a hotel room,” Clint said, unsure of where Coulson was going with this train of thought. 

“You can stay at my house,” Coulson said suddenly, nearly making Clint’s mouth drop open. “I have a guest bedroom, and it’ll save you some money. Plus, this way I can keep an eye on you to make sure that you’re not up to anything suspicious.” 

“I couldn’t possible impose,” Clint stuttered, his cheeks heating.

“Fine. How about I rephrase that,” Coulson replied, his hands tightening slightly on the steering wheel. “You can either come with me and stay at my house voluntarily or I can cite you as Romanov’s accomplice and put you under house arrest, too. At my house.” 

“…I think I’ll take the first offer,” Clint sighed, shoulders slumping slightly and wishing he could just disappear into the leather car seat. “I promise I didn’t help murder anyone, though.”

“I don’t think you did,” Coulson replied simply, surprising Clint slightly. “I’m taking these precautions more because I think you’re going to get yourself killed on your own, rather than any suspicion of your involvement in the murders. You’re very bright, just hotheaded, and if you keep flinging around your observations like they’re a parlor trick, then you’re going to get yourself killed. You need to learn a little bit of subtlety.”

“You sound like Tasha,” Clint grumbled good naturedly. 

“Is she your mother or something?” Coulson quipped, the smallest hint of a smile on his lips. 

“Something like that,” Clint laughed, although he couldn’t ever see Natasha having enough patience to raise kids, much less one like him. 

“You two aren’t… involved, then?” Coulson asked carefully, catching Clint off guard. 

“Us? No way!” Clint said, more laughter bubbling up inside his chest. “You know that saying ‘two wrongs don’t make a right’? That’s us. We’re both too messed up to form anything even remotely coherent together.” 

“You don’t come off as messed up,” Coulson said, unable to keep all of the curiosity out of his voice. 

“A lot of people don’t,” Clint replied simply. “Natasha doesn’t come off as messed up, but sometimes I think she’s even more screwed in the head than me.”

Coulson nodded slightly but didn’t give any audible reply. He made no push for extra information, which Clint appreciated, and they continued on in silence. Clint glanced out the window, taking in the scene outside. They were already long past the neighborhood of tiny, shabby apartments that Natasha lived in and were driving through a pretty residential area filled with brownstone apartment buildings. Clint smiled slightly at the bright green trees that lined the street, admiring the way the last bits of the day’s sunlight filtered through the leaves and left light dappled upon the sidewalks. It was much prettier than the harsh dark concrete of Natasha’s block. 

Clint was expecting to continue driving past the pretty brownstone neighborhood and onwards to the newer, slightly less expensive apartments, but he was surprised when instead Coulson pulled over in front of one of the brownstones. He blinked at Coulson in confusion as the other agent turned off the car and opened the door to the car, getting out and starting to walk to the front door of one of the brownstone apartments. 

“Wait up,” Clint called, realizing that yes, Coulson did in fact live here, and scrambling to catch up with Coulson at the front door. 

Clint paused, though, as he got to the top of the stairs and stood in front of the black painted wooden door. Coulson had already unlocked it and stepped inside, the door hanging ajar. Coulson looked up from toeing off his shoes, raising an eyebrow at Clint who was still waiting awkwardly on the doorstep. Clint blushed slightly, and stepped inside, feeling supremely inadequate and out of place. 

“This is your place?” he asked, hoping it sounded casual, although he had a feeling it came out a little closer to intimidated than he was going for. 

“Yes, but don’t look so intimidated,” Coulson said, laughing slightly. “It’s been in my family for generations – there’s no way my current salary would be able to cover a place like this.” 

“It’s nice,” Clint replied for a lack of anything else to say.

It was, after all, a very nice apartment. He’d just never been in a house that nice before, barring the one time he’d convinced his foster parents to let him go on the class trip to Washington DC, where they got a tour of the White House. He was in general much more used to run down wooden houses in slightly shady neighborhoods, as opposed to the pretty brownstone going from millions of dollars that Coulson apparently had inherited. 

“Come inside and make yourself comfortable,” Coulson said, taking off his suit jacket and walking further into the house, Clint entering tentatively behind him. “How does Chinese food sound?” 

“Great,” Clint replied truthfully – he hadn’t realized quite how hungry he was until Coulson had mentioned it. “Really great.” 

“Good,” Coulson said, walking into the kitchen and pulling out his cell phone, punching in a phone number that was hastily scrawled on a post-it note stuck to his refrigerator door. “There’s a place not too far from here that makes great spicy green beans.” 

“Thanks,” Clint said, smiling slightly. 

“Yes, well, your stuff is probably all locked up in Natasha’s apartment, isn’t it? The least I can do is feed you,” Coulson responded. “In return you can put up with whatever crappy reality TV show I decide to watch.” 

Clint was about to respond, but closed his mouth when Coulson started talking into the phone, someone having picked up on the other end. This whole thing was really getting kind of surreal. He was currently living in the apartment (worth millions of dollars) of a sexy FBI agent who he had met yesterday for an indefinite amount of time until they caught a high profile murderer. Seriously, was he dreaming? Things like this just didn’t happen to him. 

Well, unless Laufeyson did end up successfully convicting Natasha. That would be much more along the lines of his usual luck, and he couldn’t ignore the fact that Bobbi had been killed, too. He wondered where she’d been buried. Had she even been buried yet? Probably not, actually. Her body was still evidence in an ongoing investigation. Plus, he would have been invited to the funeral if it had already happened, would he have been? They’d been friends – he deserved to pay his respects. 

Actually, he was still kind of pissed at Natasha for not telling him about Bobbi’s death sooner. She knew that they had been friends, and she knew that he hadn’t been in contact with her much lately. She _knew_ that he didn’t know, but she hadn’t said anything! Was it because she was worried he’d try investigating on his own? Well, he probably would have, he supposed. It was still kind of a dick move for her to not tell him about Bobbi’s death, though. He would have to yell at her about that later. 

“Hey, are you feeling alright?” Coulson’s voice asked, breaking him out of his melancholy thoughts. 

“Yeah, I’m fine,” Clint replied, waving a hand dismissively, trying to dispel the worried look from Coulson’s face. “Just thinking.” 

“About the case?” Coulson asked, a hint of sympathy in his tone. 

“A bit,” Clint admitted, leaning back against the kitchen counter, curling into himself a little bit, the slump in his shoulders more pronounced. 

“Here,” Coulson said, grabbing two beers out of the refrigerator and passing one to Clint. “Why don’t I distract you with some crappy television instead?” 

“Why are you doing this?” Clint blurted, staring at Coulson. 

“Why am I subjecting you to reality TV?” Coulson asked, a slight smile on his face. 

“Why did you even let me into your apartment in the first place?” Clint asked, confusion clear in his expression. “I mean, I’m not complaining, it’s just, well, we’ve know each other for less than two days now and you’re already letting me live with you for who knows how long.” 

“Maybe I just like you,” Coulson replied, shrugging. 

“People don’t like me,” Clint said before his brain could sensor his mouth. 

“Well, I’m not most people, am I?” Coulson said, still smiling, although there was the tiniest flicker of concern in his eyes. “Plus, that can’t be true. Romanov likes you. Thor’s taken a bit of a shine to you, too, and Stark seems to get along with you well enough.” 

“I guess,” Clint admitted, looking away from Coulson so that he could avoid the other man’s intense gaze for a moment. 

“Also, like I said earlier, if Romanov is the murderer, you could easily be her accomplice,” Coulson continued, pausing for a moment to take a sip of his beer. “This way I can keep an eye on you.” 

“You are voluntarily giving a possible murderer free reign of your house?” Clint questioned, quirking an eyebrow at Coulson. “That’s not the brightest idea I’ve ever heard.” 

“I’m sure that if push comes to shove, I can subdue you,” Coulson replied casually. 

The mental image of Coulson pinning him to the floor, pressing his body up against Clint’s and capturing his wrists in an almost bruising grip seemed to knock the wind out of Clint’s chest for a moment, causing him to cough on the mouthful of beer he’d just swallowed. Fuck. The poor guy would probably be completely freaked out to find out that his new houseguest was imaging him in such compromising positions. 

“Or maybe I won’t have to,” Coulson said, grinning slightly as Clint wheezed from his recent coughing fit. “You seem to be doing pretty well on your own in that respect.” 

“Shut up,” Clint croaked, sending him a playful glare. 

Coulson laughed. Clint really wanted to make him do that again. 

A couple of hours later found them both curled up on the large couch in the living room in front of the TV, boxes that once held fried rice, Kung Pao chicken, spicy green beans and other assorted foods scattered on the coffee table. Some bizarre cooking show was playing on the screen, and Clint was still trying to figure out how exactly someone was supposed to make an appetizing desert out of chocolate, arugula, candy corn, and chili flakes. It was kind of amusing watching other people try to figure it out, too, though. 

He glanced over at Coulson for a moment, half expecting him to have fallen asleep with how quiet and still he’d been for the past half hour or so. He was surprised to instead find that Coulson was, in fact, awake and was looking directly at him. Coulson’s expression turned a little sheepish, but instead of trying to pretend he hadn’t been staring, he just smiled slightly, motioning at Clint’s face. 

“You have some sauce…” he said, indicating the corner of his mouth. 

“Oh, ah,” Clint replied, face heating in embarrassment as he tried to find a napkin. 

“Here,” Coulson said, handing him a napkin that he’d gotten from who knows where. 

“Thanks,” Clint mumbled, quickly scrubbing at the sauce before presenting his face to Coulson again for further inspection. “Did I get it all?”

“Yeah,” Coulson answered, although he sounded a little distracted, and his eyes kept straying to Clint’s lips. 

Could Coulson possibly…? He couldn’t be that lucky, could he? Clint leaned in a little closer, noticing that the space between them seemed considerably smaller than it had been just a couple of hours ago, when they’d initially sat down on the couch. Coulson seemed to be leaning in a little closer, too, if Clint was seeing things right. (And he was – his eyesight was the best.) 

“I’m reading this right, aren’t I?” Clint asked, a little more breathless than he’d been expecting, his heart pounding in his chest. 

“I hope so,” Coulson replied, his small, slightly lopsided smile back. 

Clint closed the gap between them, his lips brushing against Coulson’s lightly, almost pulling back slightly when he didn’t feel Coulson moving forward to meet him immediately. However, Coulson’s hand moved to rest lightly on the back of Clint’s neck, pulling him back in and deepening the kiss slightly, teasing Clint’s bottom lip with a bit of tongue and teeth. Their noses bumped accidentally as Clint moved in a little bit too quickly, eager to chase the taste of Coulson’s tongue with his own. Clint’s hands moved up to Coulson’s chest, his left hand toying with the knot of Coulson’s tie, starting to loosen it –

And then a loud ringing echoed shrilly throughout the room, startling Clint and making him jump slightly, his nose colliding with Coulson’s again as they both drew back quickly. Coulson shot him an apologetic look as he dug through his pockets, grabbing out his cell phone and flipping it open, confusion flashing through his eyes as he read the number. 

“Agent Coulson,” he said in his usual clipped, professional tone. 

There was a pause as he listened to the person on the other side, tension gathering between his shoulder blades. 

“Hill,” he commanded, voice becoming slightly harsher and almost a little panicked. “Agent Hill repo – shit!”

Clint heard a loud crash and a static filled hiss emit from the phone as Coulson drew it away from his ear, wincing slightly from the earsplitting volume of the bang ringing through the phone. Clint thought he heard Agent Hill yell something, but it quickly fizzed out along with the phone connection. Coulson jumped up from the couch, grabbing his shoes from by the door and shoving them on hastily, quickly shoving his gun back into its worn holster. Clint was close on his heels, grabbing the car keys off of the kitchen counter and tossing them to Coulson. 

They sprinted out the door and into the night.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Time is ticking, agents. The shooter claims another victim. Meanwhile, Clint falls in even deeper with Agent Coulson.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger Warnings: some violence and mention of permanent injury. 
> 
> Also, there is an explicit sex scene in this chapter about half way through, in case you wish to skip that. It is actually plot relevant, but you don't necessarily need to know the details... Sorry it's been so long!

Clint couldn’t remember the last time he’d run this quickly, adrenaline rushing through his veins like a flashflood and his lungs working into overdrive. He followed Coulson out to his car, jumping into the passenger seat as quickly as he could, but still only barely managing to close the door before Coulson started driving. The agent drove at a speed that should have been reckless, but somehow he executed each turn with such deadly accuracy and composure that it felt more like flying than speeding. Clint had even carefully checked out the window to make sure that they were, in fact, still on the ground.

By the time they made it to their destination, Clint suspected that he should have lost the adrenaline rush, but instead it seemed to have multiplied in anticipation. Coulson slid the car effortlessly into the parking garage of the FBI building and before Clint could even undo his seatbelt, Coulson was rushing over to Agent Hill’s side.

Clint carefully scanned the area as he moved over to Agents Hill and Coulson, seeing no sign of an attacker, but still wary. Hill’s StarkPhone was lying on the ground about five feet away from her, the screen shattered. Clint had never known anyone who was able to shatter a StarkPhone (Professor Banner included) but, then again, he’d never seen anyone try to _shoot_ a StarkPhone.

“Barton!” Coulson snapped, immediately drawing Clint away from the phone. “Call an ambulance! She’s still alive!”

“What? But she – ” Clint started, only to cut himself off, blushing as he quickly grabbed his own phone and started dialing 911. He didn’t have time to worry about logistics right now when there was a woman who was bleeding out on the ground.

He fumbled with his phone, cursing his shaking fingers. It wasn’t like he hadn’t had people’s lives in his hands before, it’s just that, well, those were all situations where _he_ was the one holding the gun – not the one calling for help. He wasn’t used to saving people, especially virtual strangers.

Clint pressed the phone to his ear, trying to calm his breathing and collect himself, closing his eyes for a moment. He could hear the line ringing, waiting to be picked up. He watched as, a few feet away from him, Coulson removed his pristine suit jacket and balled it up, pressing it to the side of Agent Hill’s head.

Someone picked up on the other end of the line.

“911.”

“I need an ambulance,” Clint blurted. “I’m, ah, inside the parking lot for the New York City FBI field office. I believe the street is Broadway and the building’s twenty six Federal Plaza. In the parking structure, we’re on the first level.”

“Okay. What is the nature of your emergency?”

“Shooting,” Clint said firmly, his voice unwavering. “The perpetrator fled before we arrived.”

“‘We’? Could you tell me your name?”

“Clint Barton,” Clint answered, “and I’m with Phil Coulson. Maria Hill was the one who was shot. We’re all FBI agents.”

“What phone number are you calling from?”

Clint listed off his phone number, glancing back over to Coulson and Hill. He had to contain a wince as he took in the sight of the copious amount of blood staining Coulson’s pants and the collar of Hill’s formerly white blouse. Could she possibly make it out of this alive, or was she already too far gone?

“You said that Agent Hill was the one who was shot? What is her current condition?”

“She appears to be unconscious,” Clint answered, swallowing uncomfortably. “She was shot in the head, but she’s still breathing and still has a pulse. Agent Coulson is applying pressure to the wound in order to stop the bleeding.”

“Okay. An ambulance is on its way. Is the rest of the FBI aware of your current situation?”

“Uh, not yet,” Clint replied, biting his bottom lip, his eyes still locked onto Agent Hill’s dangerously pale face.

“Well, things on this end are covered now, so I’d like you to hang up and notify the FBI. You’ll receive another call if something unexpected comes up.”

“I can do that,” Clint said, centering himself again. “Thanks.”

With that, he hung up.

“An ambulance is on its way,” Clint said, probably unnecessarily, but he honestly wasn’t sure what else to say.

“Good,” Coulson replied, not taking his eyes off of Agent Hill, her bloody head pillowed in his lap. “I’ve got the bleeding under control. Take my phone and call Chief Fury – his number should be in my contacts. At the same time, I want you to keep a lookout incase the shooter comes back. I’ve got my hands tied at the moment trying to help stabilize Agent Hill.”

“Yes, Sir,” Clint replied immediately, his fingers fumbling with the phone clipped to Agent Coulson’s belt.

Perhaps if the situation was anything less than what it was, Clint’s hands on Coulon’s belt would have brought up other, more inappropriate thoughts, but as it was, all Clint could think was “Call Fury – stay alive; call Fury – stay alive; call Fury – stay alive…” He fumbled slightly with the touch screen of Coulson’s StarkPhone, trying to scroll through his contacts quickly and efficiently and trying not to curse aloud at how slippery with sweat his palms were. He was painfully aware of how out of depth he was. However, he did his best of bite back his doubts and get the job done, waiting patiently as the line rang, Coulson’s phone pressed firmly to his ear as his eyes surveyed the otherwise empty parking garage. He shivered at the thought that the killer might still be with them, hiding somewhere in the shadows.

“Coulson, you better have a damn good reason for calling me at this hour,” Fury’s gruff, annoyed voice snapped when he picked up on the other end, “because, god help me, if this is about those stupid trading cards again – ”

“Chief, it’s actually Agent Barton – ” Clint started, cutting off Fury’s tirade.

“What the fuck are you doing with Coulson’s phone, Agent?” Fury replied, sounding much more alert and a lot more wary. “Has he been injured?”

“Not Agent Coulson, Sir,” Clint answered, mind still working on overdrive as he glanced around the parking structure. “It’s Agent Hill. She was shot in the head while leaving the office about ten minutes ago. She’s still alive and an ambulance is on its way, but the shooter fled before we could get here. Agent Coulson’s trying to keep her alive right now.”

“Stay where you are, Agent,” Fury commanded, and Clint could hear some sort of shuffling sound in the background. “I’ll be at your location in less than ten minutes. However, if the ambulance gets there before I do, go with Agents Coulson and Hill in the ambulance. I don’t want any of you alone at any point in time. Also, call Sitwell and tell him to call in everyone on the case, including Laufeyson’s team.”

“Yes, Sir,” Clint replied, slipping easily back into the subservient role that had been ingrained in him by more than one overbearing foster parent, only to find that Fury had already hung up on him.

He sighed and glanced back over at Coulson and Hill, eyes lingering on the deep red stain on Coulson’s previously pristine suit jacket, before looking back down at the Agent’s phone and scrolling through his contacts, trying to find Sitwell.

“Chief Fury’s on his way,” Clint told Coulson, keeping his voice remarkably steady. “He said that if the ambulance arrives before he does, we should both go with Hill in the ambulance. He doesn’t want any of us alone.”

Coulson nodded in affirmation that he’d heard Clint’s instructions, although his eyes were still scanning the parking garage, trying to pick out anyone lurking in the shadows or other idiosyncrasies. His hand which wasn’t holding the suit jacket to Hill’s head and applying pressure was wrapped tightly around his gun, prepared for an attack at any moment. Clint let out an almost inaudible sigh of relief as he finally found Sitwell’s number in Coulson’s contacts. He dialed it and waited again as the phone rang.

“Hey, what is it Phil?” a voice asked on the other end of the line, thankfully sounding not particularly annoyed, just confused.

“It’s actually Barton. I’m just using Agent Coulson’s phone,” Clint explained again, biting his bottom lip and stealing another glance in Hill and Coulson’s direction. “Agent Hill’s just been shot outside of the FBI office, and Chief Fury told me to tell you to call in everyone on the case, including Laufeyson’s team.”

“Oh, Jesus,” Sitwell gasped, clearly shocked. “Is she alive?”

“At the moment,” Clint replied, his tone grim.

“Good. Okay. Jesus,” Sitwell muttered, and Clint could hear him shuffling around in the background, probably gathering together his things to head over to the FBI field office. “I’ll keep an eye out for anyone suspicious following me or lurking around my neighborhood. Stay alive. I’ll see you in a bit.”

With that, Sitwell hung up. Clint let out the breath that he hadn’t known he was holding. He looked over at Coulson and held out his phone for him, but the agent shook his head, motioning for Clint to keep it.

“I don’t have enough hands to hold onto that,” Coulson said dryly, indicating the gun in one hand and Agent Hill in the other. “Keep it with you in case someone calls.”

Clint nodded, turning away from Coulson again and carefully examining the surrounding parking structure once again, ever vigilant. Something scattered on the ground near one of the pillars caught his eye, though. He squinted at it, trying to determine what it was, although he couldn’t quite tell from the distance he was at. It was something small and metallic – Clint had noticed it because of the way it glinted in the dim parking lot lights.

Clint carefully got up from where he was crouched next to Coulson and Hill, eyes trained on the mysterious object. It was probably just nothing, something inconsequential that had been dropped by the many passerbies that walked through the parking structure every day. On the other hand, it could be a vital piece of evidence. 

“Barton, what are you doing?” Coulson demanded from behind him, his voice a soft hiss. 

“There’s something over there,” Clint answered simply, not bothering to look back at the senior agent. “I’ll be back in just a sec.” 

Coulson didn’t make any further protests, so Clint continued onwards until he was crouched down in front of the pillar, staring down at the strange object. Well, now that he could see it, it was actually a rather simple object – just a small silver ring. Clint reached down to pick up the ring in order to examine it more closely, stopping himself just in time as he remembered that he wasn’t wearing any gloves. He frowned for a moment before pulling his shirt sleeve down over his hand, using it as a barrier between his skin and the ring, hoping he wasn’t contaminating anything. He carefully brought the ring up near his face, squinting at the engraving on the inside of the ring. It appeared to be some sort of skull with octopus tentacles. 

Clint stood up again, still inspecting the ring. He started walking back over to Coulson and Hill to show Coulson what he’d found – the symbol was irritatingly familiar for some reason – but just then his ears caught the sound of sirens. By the time he’d reached Coulson and Hill again, the ambulance was pulling into the parking structure. Right behind it was a simple black car with government plates. Fury exited the car quickly as paramedics rushed out of the ambulance. The medical team made a beeline for Hill, assessing her condition and gently removing her from Coulson’s grip before transferring her to the ambulance, shouting orders in the medical lingo that Clint only knew through bad TV shows and being on the patient end of the practice. 

Surprisingly, instead of heading for Hill, Fury headed directly for Clint. Coulson also move to stand beside him, peering over into Clint’s hand and examining the ring himself before looking back up at Fury and standing to attention, ever the professional. 

“Sir,” Coulson greeted Fury firmly, seemingly waiting for instructions. 

“Agent,” Fury replied, acknowledging him. “What can you tell me about what happened to Hill?”

“I received a call from her at approximately eleven o’clock,” Coulson started, his voice completely calm. “She started saying that she needed to meet with me immediately regarding the Morse case, but didn’t get any further than that. I heard a gunshot than a scream – from Hill – one more gunshot, and then nothing. We got here as quickly as possible to find the shooter gone and Hill bleeding out on the ground.”

“And you, Barton? Do you have anything else to add?” Chief Fury demanded, turning his one eyed gaze on Clint, and Clint couldn’t help but notice that Fury had given an odd little pause at Coulson’s use of ‘we’ – indicating both Clint and himself. 

“I found this,” Clint replied, holding out the ring clutched carefully in his sleeve covered hand. “The inscription on the inside looked familiar, but I couldn’t quite place it. It looks like a skull with octopus tentacles – ”

“Shit,” Coulson swore softly, and Clint saw the frown on Fury’s face deepen. 

“Good eyes, Agent, although in the future I’d prefer it if you didn’t disturb the crime scene,” he said, taking the ring in his own gloved hand, causing Clint to flush in embarrassment at his chastisement. “This is the symbol of the Hydra Syndicate.”

Clint’s stomach clenched. He could understand why Coulson was swearing now. The Hydra Syndicate was one of the largest crime rings in New York City and the United States, although it was highly suspected that they had strings reaching far beyond American borders. The only other crime syndicate that could even hope to contend with them in the US was the Chitauri Syndicate, and that was only because they’d merged with the Frost Giant Mob about eight years ago. Hydra had a hand in just about every sort of organized crime from political corruption and ideological violence, to sex and drug trafficking. And if the Hydra Syndicate had a mole this high up in the FBI, then they were in some pretty deep shit. 

“It looks like this shit has just gotten very, very real,” Fury said, pulling an evidence bag out of his pocket and slipping the ring inside, carefully filling out the required information – particularly the chain of possession and date and time sealed – with a permanent marker before slipping the bag into his pocket. “Agent Coulson, I want your team in my office in an hour. I’ll meet with Agent Laufeyson’s team beforehand, as soon as they get here.”

“Wait, Chief, why are you having us meet separately?” Coulson asked, confusion and a slightly wariness in his voice. “It would be much more efficient to debrief everyone at once.” 

“More efficient, maybe, but in light of this new information, I’m becoming increasingly tempted to hand the case over to Laufeyson fully,” Fury said simply, his words like a bucket of ice water poured over Clint’s head. 

“But Sir!” Coulson protested, his frown deep set. “We’ve finally gotten some proper leads on this case and – ”

“And Laufeyson has been on this case for less than a week and we already have a suspect in custody,” Fury replied simply, unwavering. “Not to mention the fact that the suspect is one of your own charges, Coulson. In fact, if I didn’t know you so well, Coulson, I might be tempted to look more thoroughly into your own involvement in this blundering case.” 

“My own involvement?” Coulson asked, outrage clear in his voice. 

“Yes, your own involvement, Agent,” Fury answered, his tone containing a hint of a growl. “So far one of your team members has been killed and another’s been shot in the head. Meanwhile, your other agents include a freelance billionaire hacker, a green transfer whose papers haven’t even come through yet, and our prime suspect.”

“Prime suspect?” Coulson repeated angrily, glaring at Fury openly now. “Romanov is a fine agent and you know it. She’s closed more cases than anyone in the New York office, exempting myself. Also, she’s under house arrest at the moment!”

“Agent Coulson, I’ve been patient with your little pet project,” Fury began, his voice cold, “but Romanov has been a loose cannon ever since she transferred here. I would also like to give you a friendly reminder that before she transferred here she spent nearly a year undercover infiltrating Hydra’s Chicago branch. Remember, this is organized crime. Just because she didn’t directly shoot Hill doesn’t mean she’s not our mole.”

That halted Coulson in his tracks. For a moment, Clint thought he could see doubt and indecision in Coulson’s eyes before it was covered up again. The older man pressed his lips into a determined line and squared his shoulders, looking Chief Fury directly in the eye. He looked unmovable.

“Look, Sir, maybe there are some things about my team that you find concerning,” Coulson said slowly, steadily, “but you know as well as I do that taking us off this case is a mistake. Laufeyson’s team may look like the most reliable answer right now, but I promise you, it’s more likely to blow up in your face. Are you really prepared to put all of this – this entire case – on Laufeyson?” 

“Coulson, at the moment your team looks more like a ticking time bomb than anything,” Fury said before turning on his heel and walking towards the entrance to the building. “You two go with Hill and call me with updates on her condition. I’ll see you in about an hour.”

\---

Maria Hill’s condition wasn’t really getting any better. She’d been in the ICU for a little over half an hour before the doctors had come to give Clint and Coulson a more detailed report. A report which included phrases such as “might not survive” and “had to induce a coma in order to reduce swelling.” Which basically meant that their one witness was going to be in a coma for at least another three days. The bullet to the head had miraculously not killed her, but it had passed directly through her frontal lobe. There would undoubtedly be effects, mainly to her personality and control of moods. She might even seem like a completely different person when she woke up. Clint took a moment struggling to imagine an Agent Maria Hill who was anyone else than the strict woman he had met only a day earlier. By the looks of it, Coulson was doing the same. 

About fifteen minutes before they were scheduled to meet with Chief Fury, agents May and Johnson came to relieve them. No words except for those that were strictly necessary were exchanged in the handoff and soon Clint and Coulson found themselves walking back into the FBI field office. Clint steeled himself for the upcoming meeting as he entered the building, trying not to focus on how quickly his time was running out. Fury had said it himself: his HR transfer papers hadn’t come in yet. He’d have to solve this case quickly and then get the hell out of dodge before he dug himself a hole he really couldn’t climb out of. 

Natasha was his main priority, though. She’d been framed – Clint was absolutely sure of it. There was no way that she’d do this, murder her fellow agents. As much as she complained about work, Clint knew she trusted them and cared for them beyond a shadow of a doubt. And she knew that Bobbi was a friend of Clint’s – there’s no way she would do that to him. Also, just the circumstances of the whole case were wonky. Natasha wouldn’t leave out an illegal gun and silencer like that. Finding the Hydra ring knowing Natasha’s past was just too convenient. 

Now if only he could convince everyone else of Natasha’s innocence. Coulson had been on his side earlier, but he’d certainly seen some doubt in him when Fury had pointed out Natasha’s connection to Hydra. Clint would have to rectify that. 

Clint and Coulson walked into Fury’s office to find the rest of the team already gathered and waiting. Their grim expressions revealed that they already knew at least the vaguest details of the situation. The dire air about the meeting was only emphasized by the noticeable absence of both Natasha and Agent Hill. Probably also by Agent Woo’s absence, but Clint had never known him and couldn’t comment. 

“In case any of you haven’t already been notified,” Fury began, drawing everyone’s attention over to him, “Agent Maria Hill was shot a little over an hour ago. She’s currently in a medically induced coma and will not be brought out of it for at least three days. A ring with the Hydra Syndicate insignia was also found at the crime scene.” 

At this announcement, the tension in the room skyrocketed. The stakes had clearly been raised. 

“Now, as some of you may already know, Agent Laufeyson and his team have become increasingly involved in this investigation,” Fury continued, looking directly at Coulson. “I met with them for a debrief directly before you, and now I’m trying to decide if I should keep your team on this case or hand it over to them in full.” 

The room was so silent you could hear a pin drop. Clint glanced over at Coulson to find his expression devoid of any sort of emotion. He wasn’t looking particularly hopeful or determined, but he wasn’t looking defeated. The rest of the team, however, looked nothing but completely floored. 

“So, if any of you have any particularly startling revelations about this case, I suggest you announce them soon,” Fury finished, just as cold as before. “Unless you can prove to me by eight pm tomorrow that it’s worth keeping you on this case, then I’m reassigning all of you. Dismissed.” 

\---

When they got back to Coulson’s house, Clint was still feeling giddy and over energized. It was already almost one in the morning and Clint suspected that he should probably get some sleep in order to be at his best the next morning, but he just couldn’t. His hands were still trembling slightly and the scent of Agent Hill’s blood still permeated the air, clinging to his skin and clothing. He felt jumpy and his brain was on overdrive, rapidly running through every scenario, every scrap of evidence that he had, but every time he came up with nothing. Nothing but the fact that if they didn’t step up their game tomorrow, Natasha would be left in the hands of Agent Laufeyson. 

All he knew was that he needed to get his mind off of all of this for a moment. He needed some sort of distraction. He needed, for a few hours at least, to stop thinking. So he did the only logical thing and pulled Coulson into a kiss as soon as they were safely inside the brownstone. 

Coulson seemed a little surprised at first, but made no protest, instead deepening the kiss with a surprising amount of force. The kiss was rough, all teeth and tongue, and Coulson seemed to be putting all of his frustration from the case into it. Of course, Clint gave as good as he got, yanking off Coulson’s tie with one hand and twisting his other hand into the agent’s short, dark hair. 

Coulson let out what could only be classified as a growl, and Clint suddenly found himself backed up against the wall of the hallway. He abruptly found himself able to breathe again, gasping as Coulson’s lips latched onto his neck instead, teeth digging into his sensitive skin, biting down a little harder than Clint had expected. Clint let out a little hiss of protest at the rough treatment, and Coulson lapped at the bitten area with his tongue apologetically before moving onto Clint’s collarbone and placing wet, open mouthed kisses along it. 

Clint let out a muffled moan as Coulson continued his ministrations before pulling him back up to kiss him again, drawing it out even longer this time. It wasn’t quite as rough as the first one, but both of their pent up frustrations were evident in the force of it. Clint fought with Coulson for dominance for a short while before finally giving up to the older man and letting him take over. Their noses bumped again as Coulson pressed him up against the wall even harder. There was almost no room between them anymore, and Clint let out a gasp as he felt Coulson thrust their hips together. 

Coulson smirked against Clint’s lips and rolled his hips again, drawing another low moan out of the younger man. Clint used his hand which was not tangled in Coulson’s hair to begin unbuttoning the agent’s dress shirt, cursing softly as his shaking fingers fumbled with the small buttons, making Coulson chuckle and start kissing him again, less desperate this time, but just as powerful and rough. Clint growled in annoyance as his already unsteady hand became even more unsteady and reluctantly untangled his other hand from Coulson’s hair in order to get the buttons undone. 

When he finally got all of the buttons undone, he took a moment to admire his accomplishment (or, rather, Coulson’s chest), but he was soon distracted as he felt Coulson’s dexterous hands swiftly undoing his belt buckle and unzipping his pants. Clint held onto Coulson’s shoulders for support and captured the older man’s mouth in another desperate kiss as Coulson focused on shoving Clint’s pants and underwear down past his hips. 

“Fuck, Coulson,” Clint gasped, breaking the kiss, as he felt Coulson’s gun callused hand grasp his cock, pumping it slowly. 

“I’m pretty sure that’s what we’re doing,” Coulson replied, his voice rough, but with clear amusement in it, clearly enjoying the way Clint was falling apart under his ministrations. 

Clint just let out a soft huff and buried his face in the crook of Coulson’s neck, letting out another moan as Coulson brushed his thumb over the head of Clint’s cock. Clint bucked his hips forward again, causing Coulson to let out a hiss of pleasure. Clint snuck a hand down between their bodies, bumping against Coulson’s own arm before getting to Coulson’s belt. Clint ended up having to use both hands to get it undone, cursing in frustration at his own fumbling fingers, trembling as Coulson continued to pump his cock. He finally got the belt undone and started on getting rid of Coulson’s pants and underwear – a feat which would have been much easier if Coulson didn’t insist on kissing and biting Clint’s neck the entire time. Not that he was complaining…

Clint finally managed to get Coulson’s boxers down past his hips, allowing his erect cock to spring free. Clint wrapped one hand around the older man’s cock while he used the other to grab Coulson’s neck and steer him back into a sloppy, open mouthed kiss. Clint continued to stroke Coulson firmly, but apparently it wasn’t enough, because Coulson abruptly jerked his hips forward, thrusting his cock against Clint’s, eliciting a sharp gasp from the younger man. He continued grinding their cocks together, both of their breathing becoming steadily heavier and more ragged. 

“Oh – Oh, fuck, Coulson, I’m – ” Clint gasped, his short nails digging into Coulson’s shoulders and probably leaving faint crescent shaped marks. 

Coulson just slammed him back against the wall again and thrust harder until Clint was crying out as he came, Coulson following only a few moments later. Coulson pressed his face into the curve of Clint’s neck, breathing harshly against Clint’s sensitive skin as they regained their senses. 

“I’m going to go take a shower,” Coulson announced abruptly, breaking Clint out of his post orgasmic haze. “You should get some sleep. We have lots of work to do tomorrow.”

Coulson then turned away from Clint and started walking down the hall, leaving Clint feeling rather lost and disoriented, still slumped against the hallway wall. 

“Also, you’re welcome to my bed, if you’d like,” Coulson added after a moment, just briefly glancing at Clint before turning the corner of the hallway and disappearing from view. 

\---

“So I kind of had sex with Coulson,” Clint blurted out, his eyes imploring Natasha for advice. 

He and Coulson were currently at Natasha’s apartment again. Agent Coulson was searching the apartment again and interviewing the agent who was monitoring Natasha the night before, while Clint was to interview Natasha for any new information in light of the previous night’s developments. Of course, Clint had a few other developments he needed his best friend’s advice on, so…

“Clint, are you fucking with me?” Natasha hissed softly, glancing over in the direction of her bedroom which Coulson was currently investigating. 

“No, actually I’m fucking with Coulson – ” Clint shot back, only to be cut off by Natasha’s withering glare. 

“Well, if you two really did have sex then something seriously wrong is going on here,” Natasha replied, mouth set in a grim line.

“Hey! I’m plenty attractive, I’ll have you know,” Clint huffed, pouting slightly. 

“It has nothing to do with how attractive you are, Clint,” Natasha replied, again glancing in the direction of her bedroom. “Coulson _never_ dates coworkers. He never even has flings with coworkers. In fact, I’m pretty sure he doesn’t have one night stands, period.” 

“Maybe I’m just that irresistible,” Clint protested. 

“Or he has some sort of ulterior motive that you don’t know about,” Natasha replied coldly, deadly serious. “I know you have some sort of misguided crush on him, but, Clint, this behavior he’s displaying toward you – letting you stay in his house, having sex with you – it’s just plain _weird_. Nothing good is going to come out of this, trust me.” 

“I thought you trusted him,” Clint retorted, crossing his arms over his chest. 

“I thought so, too,” Natasha muttered. 

\---

It was nearly noon and they still had learned nothing of value. Agents Rogers and Sitwell were out interviewing neighbors again, hoping to catch anything new. Agent Odinson was retrieving the ballistics results from the bullet which had been surgically removed from Agent Hill’s head and Coulson was reexamining the most recent crime scene. Meanwhile, Clint was stuck back in the office all alone reading through the case files for what seemed like the hundredth time. Well, he wasn’t actually completely alone. Stark was idly playing Galaga on his laptop at his desk. 

Clint felt like banging his head against his desk in frustration. However, he refrained, his eyes trailing idly over Bobbi’s file. She’d had no strange visitors, she’d made no strange phone calls, she’d neither received nor sent any strange emails, she’d not –

Wait one second. There was something wrong with this picture. There was something very, very wrong. Clint couldn’t quite put his finger on it, but it was bugging him like mad. Something to do with her emails. There was something vital missing –

Oh. 

“Hey, Stark,” Clint called, turning in his chair to face Tony who had actually bothered to look up from his Galaga game. 

“Yeah?” the techie replied nonchalantly. 

“In the report here it says that you checked both Agent Morse’s secure FBI email account and her Columbia University one,” Clint said, gesturing to the report he was holding. “I was just wondering why you didn’t check her personal one.” 

“Her school one was her personal one,” Stark answered, looking a little confused. “She didn’t have another one.” 

“What are you talking about? Of course she had another one,” Clint replied, now just as confused as Tony. 

“Wait, how would you know whether she had another personal email account or not?” Tony asked, his eyes narrowing slightly in suspicion. 

Clint bit his lip, debating how to answer the other agent’s question. He had to offer up some sort of answer, but what could he say that wouldn’t look too suspicious? Damn. Maybe he just should have kept his mouth shut…

“Um, look, I didn’t say anything before because I didn’t want anyone trying to kick me off the case for conflict of interest or anything,” Clint started, hoping that he would be able to convince Tony, “but I actually knew Bobbi before she was killed. I mean, we weren’t really close, and I didn’t even know she was dead until I was assigned to this case, but I do know that she has a separate personal email. It’s bobbim31@gmail.com.”

“Oh. That’s… helpful,” Stark replied after a moment, still looking at Clint carefully. “You know, you probably didn’t have to worry that much about conflict of interest that much if you’ve been out of contact for a while. I mean, all of us where her coworkers, so we’re probably all the same level of conflicted.” 

“I suppose,” Clint said, frowning. “Anyway, do you think you could check out her email? Just to make sure there’s not anything strange there.” 

“Sure,” Stark answered, turning back to his laptop and closing his Galaga game. “I should have it hacked in a jiffy. Watch the master, young weed hopper.” 

“I thought the term was ‘grasshopper,’” Clint said idly as he walked over to stand behind Stark and watch him work his magic. 

“No, I’m pretty sure it’s weed hopper,” Stark replied, his agile fingers flying over the keyboard as he broke into Bobbi’s personal email account. “You know, it’s kind of strange that I didn’t turn up anything about this email when I checked her computer before.” 

“Maybe you just missed it,” Clint suggested, shrugging as he leaned in to look over Stark’s shoulder as he began scrolling through Bobbi’s emails. 

“ _I_ do not just ‘miss’ things,” Tony huffed, almost pouting. “I’m sure there’s a perfectly logical explanation for why I didn’t know about it.” 

“Sure,” Clint replied, making no further comment. 

“Oh, hey, look at this one,” Stark said suddenly, clicking on the first email in Bobbi’s ‘trash’ section. “I would totally gossip about this if she wasn’t dead.” 

Clint gave him a strange look. 

“I’ve been told it’s not polite to gossip about dead girls,” Stark said, as if that was some sort of explanation. “Seriously, though – ordering a maternity test? Makes you wonder what Agent Morse was up to.”

“It can’t be for her,” Clint replied, shaking his head. “She doesn’t have any kids. Also, why are we even looking at this? It doesn’t seem like it’s relevant to the case.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure about that, weed hopper,” Stark broke in, indicating something else in the email. “Look at who she forwarded it to.” 

Clint blinked as he saw the email address: jstrzeszewski@gmail.com. The second murder victim. The email really didn’t say anything other than that the DNA, whatever DNA they had sent in, was a match for maternity. 

“So… Agent Strzeszewski and Bobbi were in a relationship?” Clint questioned, trying to figure out how any of this factored into their murders. 

“Of course not,” Stark scoffed. “That’s ridiculous. Strzeszewski was gayer than a pride parade. There’s no way anything happened there.” 

“So why did Bobbi send him the results of a maternity test?” Clint asked, frowning, trying to puzzle it out. 

“I don’t know,” Stark replied, going back to Bobbi’s inbox and trying to find any other emails like the one they’d just found, “but I can tell you that there was absolutely no trace of that email when I checked through Strzeszewski’s computer. As a fellow techie, he probably knows at least twenty different ways to bury an email so deep in the server that it’d be almost impossible to find, but, of course, that begs the question of why he didn’t want anyone finding that email.” 

“It _is_ quite a coincidence that they were both killed so soon after receiving this email,” Clint said, indicating the date the email had been sent, which was approximately thirty six hours before Bobbi had been killed and almost four days before Strzeszewski had been killed. “I don’t get how this fits into the case, though.” 

“Your guess is as good as mine,” Tony muttered. “Well, actually it’s probably not, considering I’m a genius and all, but it’s still bound to be pretty good. Don’t worry – we can’t all be me.” 

Clint supposed he’d been complimented in a sort of awkward, backhand way. Tony Stark was quite a piece of work. They continued looking through the emails Bobbi had received or sent not to long before her death, but nothing else really stood out to them. They were about to close out of the email account when Agents Coulson and Odinson strode into the room. 

“Hey, did you guys find anything interesting?” Stark called, twisting around in his chair to look at the other two agents. 

“The bullet removed from the noble Agent Hill is of the correct caliber to have been shot from a weapon such as the one that was procured from Agent Romanov’s residence,” Thor replied, although he didn’t look very pleased to say it. “It should also be noted that that particular weapon is much favored by the Hydra Syndicate.” 

“So, basically shitty news that I’m ignoring because Romanov is innocent and your brother is a dick,” Stark said cheerily, slouching back in his chair. “You got anything, Agent Agent?” 

“The security cameras didn’t catch very much,” Coulson replied, a hint of frustration leaking into his voice. “The shooter was standing in the camera’s only blind spot. They clearly weren’t expecting her to be talking on the phone, though. They shot her right as she was coming through the door and they expected to have a clear headshot, but the side of her head that was facing them was also the one that she was holding her phone up to. They knew that they couldn’t kill her by shooting through the StarkPhone, but they also must have heard part of her conversation with me and knew that they couldn’t let her say anything else. They took a different headshot, hoping that it would kill her and fled, hoping she’d be dead by the time I arrived.”

“So, again, you’ve got nothing except for the fact that StarkPhones are awesome,” Stark said, looking unimpressed. “Tell me something that I don’t already know.” 

“Please don’t pretend you’ve been doing something other than playing Galaga, Stark,” another voice cut in, and Clint turned to see Agents Stiwell and Rogers standing in the doorway, back from interviewing the killed agents’ neighbors again. 

“Ah, well, Rogers, that is where you would be wrong,” Stark replied, looking like the cat that caught the canary. “My dear friend Barton and I have been hard at work digging up the _third_ email account that the lovely Agent Bobbi Morse had stashed away, which included an email that she had forwarded to Agent Strzeszewski the day before she died.”

“Go on,” Agent Coulson said, paying his full attention now to Stark now. 

“It was an email regarding a maternity test, confirming that whatever two DNA samples were sent in were, in fact, related,” Clint answered before Stark could. 

“Okay, interesting, but what does that have to do with the case?” Sitwell asked, sipping his coffee as he leaned against the doorframe. “Did it say who the DNA samples were from?” 

“Unfortunately, it didn’t,” Clint answered, shaking his head. “Agent Stark did say that the email had been completely deleted from Strzeszewski’s computer, though.” 

“You know,” Agent Rogers said slowly, an idea dawning on him, “a while ago Agent Lewis was complaining to me about something disappearing from evidence. She’s working on that DNA database, CODIS or something, and there were some DNA profiles that she was supposed to enter into the system, but she couldn’t find the DNA samples.” 

“Agent Rogers, I want you to go question Agent Lewis about that immediately,” Coulson ordered, his expression grim. “We need to know what samples those were. Odinson, go with him to make sure no other DNA samples have gone missing from evidence. Sitwell, review the evidence logs for the past month to make sure there are no other inconsistencies. Stark, I want you to call the company who did the maternity testing for Agent Morse and get any more details you can. And Barton, you can come with me to review the security tapes from the parking lot. Let’s see if you’re able to notice anything I wasn’t able to this time.”

Stark shot him a look that seemed to say ‘good luck – you’ll need it.’ Clint sighed and followed Coulson as everyone else dispersed.

\---

Clint sighed heavily. He could barely read Coulson anymore. Not that he could read the experienced FBI agent very well in the first place, but Coulson seemed even more difficult now. Coulson was far more rigid than usual, at least partly because of the deadline they’d been put on by Fury. Clint had tried to soften him up with some light conversation multiple times already, and while Coulson would initially relax into the dialogue, as soon as he realized what he was doing, he’d close off again. Clint was going to get a headache from the whiplash. 

The problem was, Clint had found that he really wanted Coulson to like him. Well, he always had, but, and he hated to admit this, Natasha was right and he did have a hopeless little crush on Agent Coulson. When Natasha had originally suggested that Coulson had some sort of ulterior motive for getting close to him, Clint had been angry. He knew he had a special way of attracting assholes, but he really liked Coulson. Now, with all of Coulson’s strange behavior, Clint found himself dwelling on Natasha’s words more than he probably should. 

They’d watched the security tapes again in a companionable silence before pausing them to discuss any other details they’d noticed. Obviously, the fact that the shooter happened to be positioned in the camera’s one blind spot meant that the person had scouted out the parking structure beforehand. Stark had already agreed to run all of the video from the last couple of weeks through an analysis program to try and determine who spent the most time snooping around the parking structure, but that would take time. Unfortunately, Clint wasn’t able to pick up anything else new. 

Afterwards, Clint and Coulson headed over to the hospital in order to check on Agent Hill again for any new updates on her condition. Clint sighed as he stood an appropriate distance away from Coulson in the spacious hospital elevator. It was already almost seven in the evening and they only had until eight before Chief Fury decided whether they were on the case or off it. They’d come up with a couple of important details so far, and it seemed like they’d have to hope that what they’d found was enough for now. Clint had very carefully not checked to see how Agent Laufeyson was doing, not wanting to diminish in confidence in any way.

The elevator emitted a soft ding, signaling that they had arrived at the floor that Agent Hill was being kept on. The two agents walked down the hallway in silence. The floor wasn’t terribly loud, but there was a steady bustle echoing through the space. They found Hill’s hospital room and Clint opened the door, halting in his tracks as soon as he entered the room. 

Clint had not been expecting to see a strange figure dressed in an overlarge blue hoodie leaning over Agent Hill. Apparently the strange person hadn’t been expecting him, either, because as soon as he heard Clint walk in, he pulled out a gun and shot. Later, the doctor would say that the only reason the bullet didn’t lodge itself in Clint’s heart was because Coulson hadn’t expected Clint to stop so suddenly and ran into him, moving his body positioning. As it was, the bullet lodged in his arm instead and Clint went down with a yell of pain. Coulson, already off balance from bumping into Clint, went down with him and the shooter jumped over them, escaping out the door. 

“Fuck – doctor! I need a doctor!” Coulson yelled, ripping off his suit jacket and using it to stop the blood spurting out of Clint’s arm. 

Wow, he was bleeding a lot, he thought. His second thought was that now there was a bullet hole in the suit that Coulson had let him borrow. His third thought was that it was good that it was his right arm that was injured, considering he was left handed. His final thought was that, shit, the shooter was escaping. 

“Coulson, the shooter – ” Clint started. 

“Is escaping, I know,” Coulson interrupted, never taking his eyes off of Clint. “I’ll go after them as soon as we get you a doctor, okay?”

Clint was about to protest when a young woman in a lab coat with a stethoscope around her neck came skidding through the doorway. Her eyes widened as she saw the blood soaking through the suit jacket pressed to Clint’s arm and the gun clutched in Agent Coulson’s hand. Her eyes darted over to somewhere behind Clint and Coulson where one of the agents who had been left to guard Hill was collapsed on the ground, her head twisted around at an unnatural angle. 

“She’s dead. Don’t bother,” Coulson snapped, breaking her out of her trance. “Agent Barton here was just shot in the arm. The shooter is still at large, so I – ”

“Go,” the doctor commanded, dropping to her knees next to Clint and taking the suit jacket from Coulson, holding it in place all the while. 

Coulson blinked in surprise for a moment before scrambling to his feet, shooting Clint a conflicted look before racing off down the hallway after the criminal. Clint turned his head to look at the young doctor once the older man was out of sight, and even that small movement made him feel a little dizzy. He vaguely registered more doctors and nurses spilling into the room, drawn by the screaming and gunshot. 

“Sir, are you with me?” the first doctor asked, her expression stoic and professional. “Can you tell me your name?”

“Uh, Clint,” he replied blinking, feeling more than a little woozy now. 

“Do you have a last name?” she asked patiently, still maintaining pressure on his wound while some nurses rolled in a gurney. 

“Barton,” Clint answered, looking at the ground now. “Hey, that’s a lot of blood, isn’t it?” 

“Yes, it is,” she replied. 

Clint didn’t actually remember very much after that. He remembered being hauled up onto the gurney, weak from blood loss, and he remembered being rushed into surgery to remove the bullet. He remembered the doctor saying something about needing to repair an artery and needing to put him under anesthesia. He remembered wondering if Coulson had caught the shooter.

Clint woke up in a bright white hospital room. He blinked his eyes slowly, staring up at the ceiling as he tried to reorient himself, as he tried to remember what had happened and where he was. He lay like that in silence for a few moments, breathing deeply and willing himself to just remember. 

“Mr. Clinton Francis Barton,” a voice said slowly, drawing Clint’s eyes over to the figure seated in the visitor’s chair. “Twenty years of age and a full time student at Columbia University.”

Chief Nicholas Fury looked up from the manila folder placed in his lap, his one good eye meeting Clint’s own panicked gaze. 

“It looks like we both fucked up, doesn’t it?” he said, not even bothering to blink. “If you can think of any way to fix this mess, I’m open to suggestions.” 

Clint opened his mouth but no words came out. 

“That’s what I thought.”


End file.
